Recently, I’ve began the laborious process of migrating away from Google Analytics on most of my sites.   Why?  Because it is frankly starting to scare the hell out of me.

Here’s why:

• Bounce rate is believed to be a factor used in determining your Google search rankings.  This is a measure of the percentage of visitors the leave your site after only viewing the initial first page.  It would be silly and very unfair for Google to penalize sites that don’t use Analytics, however, for sites that do use Analytics, Google can easily access your bounce rate.  Without Analytics, I can’t think of an easy way Google engineers could figure this out, unless they’re using data from the Chrome browser, in which case we’re all fucked.  I know some people will say “well, just create quality websites with unique content that engage your visitors, and your bounce rate will go down”.  I’ve said the same thing myself.  It’s good advice.  But I still don’t want Google having such easy access to data that they’ll use in determining my rankings.
• Lately, Google has been on a real witch hunt for private blog networks and other SEO services.  There’s been reports by many companies about their domains being deindexed by Google, which essentially destroys their business.  Being in the SEO biz, I don’t want to share any data with Google if they’re coming after people like me.
• I’m worried about the whole footprint issue, with all my sites using Analytics, I’m assuming that somehow this makes it easy for Google to calculate similarities in traffic between my sites and negatively impact my rankings.  I also think Bing/Yahoo can notice this footprint.  Maybe this is over-the-top paranoid, but it worries me nonetheless.

Here’s a few of the alternative web analytics tools/services that I’ve been evaluating:

StatCounter

• They host your data and you just have to add a bit of javascript code to your site.  So, no FTPing or creating databases to get StatCounter to work.
• Their Free account seems decent, suitable for sites that you don’t care about Goals or Actions or anything super comprehensive

Clicky

• Another popular hosted service.
• They specialize in real-time data and have a tool that allows you to popup a chat window with visitors
• Their Free account doesn’t seem very good, so there’s a fair bit of pressure to upgrade to a Paid account.

Piwik

•  Probably the most popular open-source, self-hosted solution.  This means you need to download the software, unzip it, FTP it to your server, create a MySQL database, then go through the installation process.  It’s a PITA initially but…
• The functionality is much better than StatCounter, at least from what I’ve seen
• I’ve been running Piwik on a few sites for over a year, the only problem being some larger reports have trouble loading due to PHP memory issues.  This could be resolved by moving away from shared hosting to something with more horsepower like a VPS or dedicated server.

Open Web Analytics

• Another self-hosted app, so you’re running it on your own server.
• Clean and comprehensive interface.
• It looks like Piwik is the more popular self-hosted tool, but OWA has an impressive list of features.
• Comparison to Google Analytics:  http://www.openwebanalytics.com/?page_id=158

What about you?  Have you left Google Analytics for similar reasons?  I’d love to hear your thoughts.

I stumbled across this site recently and thought it was a pretty clever idea.   YouLikeHits.com allows you to:

• Get Twitter followers
• Get Facebook likes
• Get MySpace followers
• Get StumbleUpon followers
• Get Digg followers
• Get visitors to ANY website

I just saw a very interesting video post on SEOmoz:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/correlation-data-for-seo-and-social-media-analysis-part-2-whiteboard-friday

One of the things we did when we saw no-follow links having a really high correlation was we went, well that’s just weird. Maybe what’s going on here is that no-follow links and followed links have a high correlation with each other, and in fact, they do. If you have lots of no-follow links, you tend to also have lots of followed links. So, that makes sense. All right maybe that’s all that’s causing it. But then there’s this one weird, weird data point – well, there’s several weird ones – but there’s this one weird data point around the percentage of followed links having a negative correlation, kind of a strong negative correlation with rankings, which sounds weird, but it suggests that websites and web pages that don’t have any no-follow links aren’t performing as well as those who have at least some or some reasonable percentage of them.

This paragraph caught my attention enormously, mostly because I’ve always been of the opinion that natural backlinking from a variety of sources is the best way to do off-page SEO.  I’ve always thought that a healthy mixture of noFollow and doFollow links were important, otherwise it’s pretty frickin’ easy for search engines to notice that you’re trying to “game” your rankings.  This is also why my automated social media service, SocialAdr uses a mixture of noFollow and doFollow social media sites.

Aaron @ SEOmoz sums it up well when he adds:

What I think that’s happening is that people who do natural things, normal websites, this is not normal. It is not normal to have a website that only has followed links. It’s almost like, man, you must be doing something funny because normal websites earn links from no-follows. They get linked to on Wikipedia, which is no-follow. They have blog comments that people leave and point to them. Those are no-follow. They have social media profiles. Almost all of those are no-follow. People tweet about them. Those are no-follow. There are all of these no-follow links that exist from sort of good places on the Web where you would naturally be mentioned if you’re a good website.

Thoughts?

Occasionally I come across an SEO tool that I feel is worthy of blogging about, and oddly enough today I have two of ‘em.

Linklicious

Instead of wasting hours building RSS feeds and pinging the feeds hoping for crawls, Linklicious eliminates all of the guesswork by providing a guaranteed 100% crawl rate.   It comes with a WordPress plugin so every post is added to an RSS feed, auto-shortened, pinged, and tracked so you can see exactly when your links were spidered.

Linklicious is quite affordable too:  they have a free account and the most feature-packed paid account is only $54/mo.

Here’s a chart that shows the improved crawl late with and without using Linklicious:

Link Pushing

I was looking for a completely automated, hands-off service that combined multiple backlinking techniques.   So I headed over to the Warrior Forum and a quick search brought me to this WSO.

Here’s what the “Link Pushing” service offers:

1. User enters their information; a 2 minute process.
2. System grabs an article from a random article directory.
3. System spins the article using The Best Spinner.
4. System submits the articles to Web 2.0 Properties and Auto-Approve Article directories backlinking to the money site.
5. System then submits to various Doc share sites splitting the backlinks randomly to the money site, the Web 2.0s and the Auto Approve articles.
6. System then submits to microblog sites with links randomly split between the money site, the Web 2.0s and the Auto Approve Article sites.
7. System then submits spun articles to non-auto approval article sites with backlinks to the Web 2.0s and the auto approved article sites.

I had a couple questions before signing up and was super impressed with how quickly and professionally Greg (one of the owners) responded to me.  Although this service is in its infancy, so far I really like how easy it is to use and it seems like these dudes have some great features planned in the next release.  I don’t have enough data on its effectiveness to improve SERPs yet but I’ll post an update when I do.

If you’re like me and use Skype for a lot of internet marketing communications, you’ve likely noticed that it saves all conversations in encrypted files on your local hard drive.

Why?  I have no frickin’ idea, but it’s a bit ridiculous.  This means that if you have Skype installed on your laptop, desktop, and cell phone, there’s 3 different versions of your conversations stored…one on each device…that you can only access locally.  If your laptop is stolen, there goes all those conversations, never to be seen again.  And if you decide to reformat your computer, reinstall the O/S and Skype, good luck retrieving your conversations, even if you backed up the encrypted files.  There’s not even a tool available to unencrypt the files.

Hopefully you’re familiar with Gmail and its kickass archiving, labeling, searching, and cloud-access functionality.

Well, the good news is I’ve found a Skype plugin that will save all your Skype conversations (both text and voice) to your Gmail account.  This means you’ll never lose anything, you can access your history from any computer, anywhere in the world, and everything is super easy to search.

How much will this cost ya?  Well a couple months ago I paid $24.99 (one-time fee), but for the next 5 days it’s available for only $14.99.  Heckuva deal if ya ask me!