Google announced today that they will now be automatically using the SSL version of their search engine for any user who is logged into their Google account.
Their official reasoning behind it is that it adds a new layer of security for those who rely on Google daily (read: everyone) as it is now much more difficult to sniff search queries on public wifi, via spyware, and any other attack vector.
Sure, that sounds pretty cool, thanks for doing that.
This is all fine and dandy, until you get to this part:
When you search from https://www.google.com, websites you visit from our organic search listings will still know that you came from Google, but won’t receive information about each individual query.
Every single site owner and SEO on the planet should have had their ears (eyes?) perk up when they read that part.
It gets even better when you hit this gem:
If you choose to click on an ad appearing on our search results page, your browser will continue to send the relevant query over the network to enable advertisers to measure the effectiveness of their campaigns and to improve the ads and offers they present to you.
What does this all mean? It means Google has just blocked referrer keyword data from organic results from ALL analytics platforms whenever a user is logged in to their Google account. However, if a user reaches you via an Adwords PPC ad, they’ll still pass along that referrer data to your preferred analytics platform.
Want to see how useful the data they give is? It’s already showing up in my analytics:
MAN THAT IS SO HELPFUL, THANKS GOOGLE
To say this is an abuse of power is quite an understatement. Google very well knows the search queries that sent users to you, seeing as how they are the ones who sent them in the first place. But in order to avoid anti-trust issues, rather than only allowing that data to show up in Google Analytics, they’re going to block it from all platforms instead. So in the effort of being fair, they’re screwing over everyone.
This just goes to show that Google is NOT on the publisher’s side. While publishers are the entire reason Google is in business (They’re the world’s largest scraper, their index is entirely full of other publisher’s content), Google has decided that unless you’re paying them to run your ads, you don’t deserve to know how people got to your site through their engine.
In reality, it will make analytics a slight bit less useful, but there will still be all the data coming from users who aren’t logged in to Google, which I would imagine makes up quite a few users in actuality. However, it’s still extremely inconvenient for those of us who look at our referrer data to determine which pages on our site we need to beef up with new internal links, content, images, or videos in order to increase their rankings even higher.
But you know who else it screws with? SEOs who are smart enough to use their analytics data to power their Adwords campaigns. For some stupid reason, most people treat SEO and PPC as mutually exclusive ideas that will cause the world to ignite if you were to combine them together. However, a smart website owner, ecommerce store owner, or affiliate marketer will build a site that performs well in the SERPs as well as on the Adwords PPC network, and they’ll use the data from PPC to optimize their sites and the data from their organic traffic to optimize their PPC campaigns. With this latest rollout of SSL, a schism will be formed between your organic traffic analytics and your PPC campaigns.
The Bottom Line: Google’s customers are ADVERTISERS, not website owners and publishers.
For years, Google has been very vocal about why you should never buy backlinks for your sites. There have been a good amount of horror stories about people who buy backlinks and then find their site completely removed from the index for up to 6 months or more. Obviously, this could literally put your company out of business if it happens to you.
And yet, anywhere you go, you’ll see all kinds of ads for sites like Text Links Ads, Links XL, and others, who broker links. They all have huge pools of publishers who they are able to sell links on their own sites through the link broker networks. This seems like a sitting duck situation, where Google could possibly sniff out the entire network and systematically crush an entire portion of the internet. But this doesn’t really seem to be happening, and that’s because these networks are doing a good job of hiding the fact they’re selling links. They leave little if any footprint, so unless Google actually came into their network to sniff out who is participating, things are pretty safe.
But it still begs the question, why does Google not want me to buy links? The answer is connected to the core of Google’s ranking technology, and is a pretty basic one once you see it.
The super simplified way of describing how Google uses backlinks to determine how a site should rank is that each backlink is a “vote” for the target site. These votes aren’t all equal; a link on a no-name site is not even close to being worth as much as a link on a big authority site. But regardless, a link is an endorsement according to Google.
By purchasing backlinks, you’re all of a sudden “stuffing the ballot box” and artificially increasing your backlink numbers. Without a way of discerning which backlinks were naturally procured as opposed to purchased, Google has trouble knowing how legitimate a site is or if the owner of the site just has deep pockets.
Because of how large and powerful Google is, they are able to set their own internal rules that everyone starts to follow because if they don’t and get caught for something Google doesn’t like, the penalty could potentially devastate their traffic and cash-flow. So Google is in this unique “internet police” position where they can somewhat control people’s behavior online simply by discouraging certain practices.
The thing is, if there is no footprint to identify your paid links with, Google has no damn clue that you paid for them. Because of this, if you have the cash, you can snatch some very powerful links that would be challenging to naturally get at least early on in a site’s life and can dramatically increase your site’s ranking.
Despite Google’s authority, they simply can’t be all knowing. Whether you have a handful of independent, powerful sites that you interlink to help each one out, or you buy links, it’s a way to fast track your site to high rankings in competitive niches.
Rand at SEOMOZ wrote a great post about his experiments with paid links, and the results pretty clearly show what I’m saying here. If you have the budget for the links, it’s definitely something to (carefully) use.
One of the first bits of advice I give to anyone who is looking to start actively pursuing SEO and link building is to start analyzing (and copying) your competitors backlink profile in the top 10 results. When looking at low competition results where the backlink numbers are low, that isn’t much of problem…you just pop over to Site Explorer and do a backlink look up and then export the results and start crawling through them.
But if you’re attacking a niche with high backlink competitors, things become a lot more challenging. That’s annoying if you want to copy someone, but GREAT if you don’t want to be copied. Which leads to…
So let’s say you’ve been working really hard to dig up these great High PR backlink opportunities. Your site is crawling up the SERPs and is about to front page. In any niche where other SEOs are watching the top ten, you better believe they will be eyeing you well before you make it up to the top.
As was said before, if you have under a thousand backlinks for the page you’re trying to rank, you’re susceptible to someone checking your page out in Site Explorer and seeing all of your cards. This is not an ideal situation as it prevents you from hiding the links you have found and built.
In order to keep your stuff under the radar, you need to fill up your backlink profile with a bunch of junk links. These can come in a variety of forms, but the most popular are pligg, auto approve comments, and forum profile links. All of those are easily automated and can be acquired in high volume for very cheap from your friendly neighborhood links dealer.
Yes.
Almost definitely no.
Absolutely they could, though most likely not negatively, except for some potential short term dancing. If you’re feeding your sites good content, and building great quality links at them, then pouring a bunch of cheap spammy links at the site isn’t going to do much, otherwise everyone else would be doing that to you.
I really can’t stress that enough. Spammy links on their own are almost never the only reason a site is penalized by Google. Just like it’s very easy to build spammy links, it’s also very easy to point them at competitors. If I could take down competitors with low quality spam links, I would do that. But it just isn’t that simple.
What’s cool about this little strategy is not only are you hiding your good links to make them harder for people to copy, you’re also diversifying your backlink profile quite a bit, which is always a good thing.
As long as you keep building good quality content on your site and keep feeding in the best quality backlinks you can find, you can feed in cheap links and be good to go. I would definitely spread things out over time though, and make it consistent. Using something like Drip Feed Blasts is a fantastic option for that. The biggest thing is not drawing attention to yourself unnecessarily.
Yep, absolutely. It requires some fancy scripting in order to do so, but it’s definitely possible. I’ll cover that in a future post.
For the most part, spam isn’t going to make you many friends in most social circles. Use discretion.
Forum profile links don’t really get in anyone’s way; they add a few pages to a forum, but they don’t ruin the forum experience whatsoever. Auto approve comments are generally on blogs that are abandoned or unprotected, which is unfortunate if the blog owner cares but otherwise is like skateboarding in an abandoned pool, no one is really going to be bothered in the end of the day. Pligg is just plain shitty no matter how you spin it, so go for it.
Other links can become more and more devious and will most likely cross the standard moral boundaries at some point in your adventures. The best advice I can give is don’t be a dick to people. Don’t trash someone’s site, be creative, there’s always multiple means to the same end.
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