Once you start having a lot of websites, you need to be able to track which one of them are getting traffic and from which keywords, also you need to make sure your sites are up and running everyday so you need to have a tracking system that shows a dashboard for all your sites at the same time so you can see in 5 minutes that all your sites are up.
Google Analytics does that but it also links all your sites together to any other internet marketer and it allows Google to know that all your sites are linked together and it gives them a lot of information on your websites, which is what you don’t want in case they decide you’re doing something they don’t like and ban you.
My personnal alternative is StatCounter.com
It doesn’t link your sites together and it has a main dashboard. It’s not self hosted which means no time wasted troubleshooting.
The only downside is if you want to save data information about more than the last 500 visits per website, you need to pay. Well personnally I only need that for a few websites so I pay and it’s very cheap.
If you want to save data for your website for a long time you should use Woopra.com as well. It doesn’t link your sites together. It doesn’t have a main dashboard though so I suggest that you use both.
The end.
Hi Fingerman,
i have one question about Ezine and Buzzle. After the algo change nothing seems to be normal anymore. I add my articles to ezine about two weeks ago, all articles are review status, all articles are 500+ words, uniqe. Its not easy to add premium articles to ezine?
Buzzle register page are in maintenence. So i think we are see same changes there future.
Do you have same problems? Do you have some suggestions what to do? What article directories to use, when my sites are new and fresh.
Thanks!
Hey Fingerman,
I just started my own personal wordpress blog. I’ve added adsense to it etc.
I was wondering if it’s worth verifying my site with google adsense?
If yes, I’ve been trying to get my site verified through site authentication etc. but still the site status just display an error and that my site is not verified with the,
I currently have 2 niche sites and am using google anaylistics do you think i should remove it and change to stat counter or is having just these 2 that are not linking to each ok?
Is there anyways you guys could make a post talking precautions you need to take to protect your websites from google and other people. And then talk about why they are essential and the best way to cover your tracks
Im clueless on this atm
Fingerman, i thought we are building quality sites here? Why would we need to avoid Google Analytics if we provide value? There seems to be some risk involved with them? Not only Google Analytics can measure traffic, it can also track AdSense clicks.
And i wonder why you did not list Piwik here. It is a self hosted solution and open source alternative to Google Analytics.
Here are more sources of abundance of analytics:
http://sixrevisions.com/usabilityaccessibility/10-promising-free-web-analytics-tools/
http://regulargeek.com/2010/05/29/25-free-google-analytics-alternatives/
Not all websites use adsense, even if most of mine currently do. He has some with CPA offers. And, analytics makes it very easy to spot someone’s entire network of sites. It’s not just google, it’s other internet marketers… I discovered some other big backlink networks by just spying on their analytics which I saw 2 people stupidly keep on their network of sites.
He used to use Piwik but it got very complicated ( I think he mentions that in the video) to keep it updated so it keeps tracking while being self hosted on another domain so they do not link to each other. Woopra/statcounter are much simpler alternatives and he decided to use statcounter because he had an easy to see central dashboard to monitor all his websites traffic within a minute every day to make sure they are all online etc.
Alex would be very interesting to hear other ways you guys keep your sites security and preventing from other people to find all your sites….
Also ways you keep your adsense account from being banned by google.
Theirs not that many other ways to protect yourself. Private registration, different hosting IP (not that important if you are on shared account… my bluehost/hostgator/hostnine accounts all share their ip’s with hundreds of websites) and especially do not use the same google analytics on every website.
Personally, I use google analytics on all my adsense sites because the combination is so effective and analytics reveals my network anyway.
Honestly, Google does not ban adsense accounts for no reason like a lot of people like to say. I’m sure it happens and I’ll really regret my words if I do get banned one day but I’m pretty sure a lot of people say things like “I had great content on my website blah blah” which first of all might not be true, but second of all content is just a small thing google looks at… If you have a site that looks like the old xfactor websites with very minimal navigation that’s just not a good site for google to see on their search engine.
Alex,do you have example of how a site shouldn’t look like?…of some of xfactor example site?
I have 3 adsense places on my sites, left side,center before the posts and on the right sidebar after the pages and posts links…you think that is fine with adsense?
btw how can I know if I have shared hosting account or not?I’m with the basic hosting account with bluehost, no idea if it means shared or not….
thanks a lot!
Haha, I had a lot of x factor sites (with EMD’s) competing with some of my keywords in several niches, and today I was looking to find you an example and in the 5 queries I remembered finding some as I was reaching the top well… they are all gone! Well I saw some others but they do not have the old themes, I guess they changed it. Anyway it looks something like this http://clickbumpengine.com/clickbump-theme/xfactored/ Were the main page text has a white background with Google ads on top of the text usually. The reason Google does not like that theme (well one of them) is that the right sidebar would have a menu but with the background black/very dark so people barely can see it and only see ads when they click on the search result. Anyway, I doubt you would make a bad theme with artisteer unless you really tried to.
EDIT: Found an example while doing keyword research lol, wirelessheadphonesfortv.org
Pretty much all basic accounts are shared, you could check spyonweb.com, put your website and it will probably show other websites that share your IP. Non shared accounts are usually $20+ or you might pay an extra fee like $3 for a dedicated IP… Which is not very important at all unless you have an ecommerce store (I think you need a dedicated IP to apply for certified security stuff that your visitors can see when they buy products).
man thanks a lot for your response, damn! i saw this theme a lot! I need to compete against those sites!
Alex have you heard about the bluesense theme? I have very similar theme for my website and it seems to have great ctr! around 10-30% , do you think this kind of theme is fine?
how the bluesene looks like…
adsense-day.blogspot.com/2009/11/bluesense-adsense-ready-blogger
my theme is not this,but very similar to it…
btw.
11 days or so before ending my first month on this – 10$ from adsense fuck yeah!
just bought AMR and UAW and hope to start to see some better results in serp
Haha, bluesense was the first theme I used. It did ok but Fingerman recommended me at that point to try artisteer and I ended up making a much nicer looking theme that was able to conserve the CTR. Ultimately it’s your choice, but I really was proud of that first theme I created :P.
GL with AMR/UAW, just make sure to keep the daily submissions not too high to not risk getting sandboxed or labelled as a spammer for a few weeks/months… With UAW I would keep it at 20/day per article and AMR 75 or so (since half of the submissions usually fail)
yeah I’ll keep that in mind! thanks again!
btw Alex just one small question….the numbers with UAW and AMR you would use those numbers lets say for site of 1 month old?…
after almost 1 month of my sites i just did today 25 per day with AMR for some of my pages(keywords i’m targeting) after learning the software the all day….and i’m about to use UAW to boost my article directories and web2.0 sites….
you think I can do more with your numbers to such site for ex?
I usually wait at least 2 months but that’s easier for me since I can be patient having so many sites to work on currently. if you are linking to article directories/web 2.0s to reinforce your backlinks/blog network linking to your own sites than ya, for articles linking to those you can make it higher, I would still caution to take things slowly.
It’s not really by being “scared” of getting a google penalty but more because I have a lot of great experiences with slowly linking articles and them getting higher and higher rankings over the next weeks. When I blast a page (even on an established domain that’s 1 year old) I usually get very high rankings within a few days, but then that page settles on page 2-3+ and it takes more effort to bring it back to page 1 (like more spun articles).
thanks mate!so i’ll probably try to be more patient and maybe look for new sites…
btw for new sites….when you doing your market research….if you find 1 keyword with potential for lot of money, but no related keywords in this niche that you can compete with….would you build a site that is main focus is 1 keyword?
…
thanks a lot!
Well, yes and I would build related articles on that topic/niche to hopefully build more than a 1 page site (but you could just add a post every 2-4 weeks or something since they do not target a keyword but are created to mostly help your main KW rank). The thing is for me a keyword with lots of money would have thousands of searches, it seems hard to believe I can’t find sub categories of that keyword that I could write articles about. But ya, just build a website on that topic, especially if you can get the exact match domain.
when i say 1 keyword i mean ofcourse 1 keyword to compete on google, but lots of pages/posts related etc…
“Theirs not that many other ways to protect yourself. Private registration, different hosting IP (not that important if you are on shared account… my bluehost/hostgator/hostnine accounts all share their ip’s with hundreds of websites) and especially do not use the same google analytics on every website.”
Alex what do you mean by saying to not use same Google Analytics on every website? You mean i need to create account for every new website?
“Well, yes and I would build related articles on that topic/niche to hopefully build more than a 1 page site (but you could just add a post every 2-4 weeks or something since they do not target a keyword but are created to mostly help your main KW rank).”
2-4 weeks seems too slow. Manual AdSense review may occur any time and if they land on website that has too little posts then i don’t what they may think. In my opinion posting once per day is best.
Well, if you have websites that did not use adsense and you are paranoid about ppl finding all your websites than yes, you would need to make a new gmail analytics account for each of these (or use another service).
Alex,
I went ahead and changed all my sites to statcounter now.
Now you stated somewhere that you still use analytics only for your adsense, why?
Also, how can someone find all your sites if you have analytics installed?
Thanks!
because adsense already links all your websites together anyway, and google analytics can track the adsense money you made for each visitor that came from x search term. In adsense tracking alone you can only track the money you made per URL.
You can use http://spyonweb.com/ to see what other websites share the same IP/adsense/analytics.