Ad HustlerConfessions Of A Serial Internet Entrepreneur

Yesterday Google posted a bombshell on their blog.  The post was called “Making Search More Secure.”  The jist of the post is that Google will start forcing logged in users to “secure search” which is esentially https://www.google.com – The consequence of this is that users that click a search engine result through a “secure search” will not pass the referring keyword along with them.  This means that your analytics software will be able detect that a user came from Google but not WHICH TERM they used to get there.  This is quite a step back from what’s happened in recent years where we can actually get more and more information about our users, not less.  You will still be able to see the referrers of non logged in users, so you don’t lose all keyword referrer data but you do lose some.

This is going to be wide reaching.  Lot’s of different internet marketing niches rely heavily on analytics and keyword referrer data.  Blackhat SEO’s are going to probably be hit super hard, especially ones who adjust the content of their site to reflect the keywords referred.  Even the most white hat of sites like ecommerce sites are going to be effected because they won’t be able to accurately judge how people are arriving at their sites.

There’s nothing we can do about it.  Google loves making the jobs of internet marketers harder so we just have to adjust.

One thing i’m really surprised about is that Google didn’t execute this new move differently.  Hear me out here:

Google likes people to use Google Analytics because it allows them to accumulate more and more data about the web.  Google also loves to dominate industries.  Although i’m not for it, Google has a huge opportunity here to make every other Analytics software completely worthless and FORCE people to use Google Analytics.  Since Google owns both the search and the analytics they could easily securely transfer the referrer data from the search to Google Analytics using some kind of encryption.  That would make Google Analytics the ONLY analytics software able to give you complete keyword referrer analytical data and give Google Analytics control over the entire analytics industry.

But I digress….

What are your thoughts on this move?

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When building out a campaign for Google Adwords there’s often a lot to do.  Not many other online ad platforms have a Quality Score in which the page that traffic is sent to is judged as harshly as Google Adwords.  Between worrying about site structure, relevant content, click through rate and more it’s easy to overlook the simple things.

If you are collecting lead information on your landing page DO NOT FORGET the privacy policy.  I have noticed a trend of Google marking all ads as “Site Suspended” if the site is collecting user information and does not have a clear privacy policy.  Once the site get’s suspended it’s impossible to run any ads.  You can get a “Site Suspended” account reversed but why go through the trouble and time?  Don’t Forget The Privacy Policy!  If you need a free place to create a privacy policy visit FreePrivacyPolicy.com.

Anyone else seeing this trend more and more?

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I’ve been doing a test lately for reputation management using search engine optimization.

I have a product and want to control what people see about it when they search for a term like “Product x Reviews”

In order to do so we’ve created 30+ social media sites using “Product x Reviews” as the title tags.  Over time some of these profiles have ranked page 1 with no effort.  I decided i’d grab 10 of the highest ranking (for that term) profiles that we have and do link building to them to try to dominate the entire first page for “Product x Reviews.”  I purposely did not diversify the anchor text because I wanted to see how easy it would be to rank over authority review sites.  Quite honestly, I expected it to be easy.

What happened though was kind of strange.  Although some of my social media profiles did move up a bit, some of the authority review sites moved down and other random sites moved up to 1, 2 & 3 position.  So in essence I acomplished pushing down the authority review site but a random site rather then my own took it’s place.

SEO is Unpredictable

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I’ve been doing a bunch of SEO sites lately and I learned an unfortunate lesson which I figured I’d share.

The background: I would launch sites and some would never seem to get indexed no matter what I did.  I could ping them, build backlinks, add content…..nothing worked.

I decided to check on the whois history of the problem domains and they all had something in common.  The common element was that they had previous registrations.  My only assumption is that these previous registrants had a penalty on their sites, hence dropped the domain, yet the penalties remained.

Lesson learned!

When doing domain research before buying domain names for your SEO properties check out if there is a whois history on the domain.  I’ve been using the DomainTools search.  Although previous registrations are not any kind of guarantee that there is a penalty on the domain, I would be particularly careful if your buying cheap .info type domains.

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Disclosure: No compensation was received for mentioning DomainTools

I’ve been off on a lot of projects lately.  Many of these projects have to do with building sites that are designed for SEO traffic.  I’ve built about 50 sites in the last few months and some of the trends I see are interesting so I figured i’d share.  The first 25 or so sites that I built in this cluster, I almost immediately built links for because we all know that links are extremely important for search engine optimization.  About 1/3 of the sites in that cluster started getting traffic within a week or so.  About 2/3 of the sites never got any traffic at all (yet).  That discovery is really nothing revolutionary.  Obviously if you are pumping out a bunch of sites in different niches, some will get traffic and some won’t.

For the second cluster of sites (25 or so sites) I haven’t worked on getting any links as of yet.  I planned to let the sites age a little bit before doing link building.  One observation I find interesting though, is that out of these 25 sites, 5 of them have started to get traffic.  Again, THESE SITES HAVE NO LINKS GOING TO THEM!  This made me ask myself how could the search engines have firstly found these sites and secondly ranked them to any degree with NO LINKS?  I don’t actually know the answer to this question but here are a few hypothesis I made:

1. Google/Search engines are watching registrar databases to see domains being registered and preemptively crawling them.  Hense, no links needed.
2. These domains were exact match, so maybe that has something to do with it.
3. These domains are on an IP with other sites that are indexed, maybe Google/Search Engines find an IP and then look for other sites on that IP?

Whatever the cause is, it’s pretty cool that it happens.  Since i’m working on a bunch of sites, i’ll update you guys on any observations I make.

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