Private Network Blogs and Google Analytics

[NicholasCollins]

This question is aimed to those who use their own private network of sites/blogs for SEO reasons. I am familiar with the separate IPs and the making the individual sites appear natural and such but my question is if you have 150 or so of your high ranking blogs/sites in your portfolio are you using 1 google analytics account to monitor your metrics for your network?

It seems that you would want to keep track of how the individual sites within your network are performing all in one snapshot but it seems that having them housed under 1 Uncle Google Analytics account would be risky but it also seems terribly time consuming and cumbersome to distribute them to different GA accounts as well especially if your using the adwords/analytics controls which ties your 2 accounts together?

[MikeFriedman]

Originally Posted by NicholasCollins

This question is aimed to those who use their own private network of sites/blogs for SEO reasons. I am familiar with the separate IPs and the making the individual sites appear natural and such but my question is if you have 150 or so of your high ranking blogs/sites in your portfolio are you using 1 google analytics account to monitor your metrics for your network?

It seems that you would want to keep track of how the individual sites within your network are performing all in one snapshot but it seems that having them housed under 1 Uncle Google Analytics account would be risky but it also seems terribly time consuming and cumbersome to distribute them to different GA accounts as well especially if your using the adwords/analytics controls which ties your 2 accounts together?

First of all, I do not allow Google Analytics anywhere near any of my sites, ever. That is another discussion though.

Second, why would you want analytics on a private network? You are using the network to build backlinks. You are not generating traffic to the network. Rankings and traffic are not important on those sites.

The only tracking I do on my SEO network is to run sites through SpyGlass periodically to monitor incoming links. Just so I know if a site is losing links, I need to aim some high PR links at that site to maintain the PR.

[rachs]

Before your stick google analytics on any site. Make sure that site's cleaned. The anylatics is nothing than give google some access and deep stating.

[Mike Anthony]

Originally Posted by NicholasCollins

This question is aimed to those who use their own private network of sites/blogs for SEO reasons. I am familiar with the separate IPs and the making the individual sites appear natural and such but my question is if you have 150 or so of your high ranking blogs/sites in your portfolio are you using 1 google analytics account to monitor your metrics for your network?

kiss of death. If even one of your sites gets reported for links you have linked all of them together and will potentially jeopardize every last one. If the network is for SEo as Mike indicated you really don't even need much metrics

[NicholasCollins]

Thanks for the replies. My thought process was you have your main asset which is your network of high Page ranked sites that you are trying to grow and keep PR strong. I was thinking your also managing and growing the network and naturally you would want to see how your efforts are for growing and maintaining your network.

Mike F, are you saying that if you purchase a high PR site into your network you just let it do its thing as it is and never monitor its growth? I envisioned growing it to make it larger each month so that as your internal network grows it pumps out more juice to the site you have it pointed to and the only way to truley see whats working is with analytics.

I know in the case of Matt Laclears network they are all new .info so i can see how monitoring their variables are nill but I was thinking of buying big then growing. Thanks for the input and clarification guys.

[MikeFriedman]

I am confused about what information you think Google Analytics is going to give to you about the "growth of your network".

What is it you are looking to track?

The only thing I track is the PR. If I create a separate page on a domain, I track it's PR as well.

You are not trying to rank these sites nor are you trying to drive traffic to them. You are driving traffic to your main sites by boosting them up in the search engines through the backlinks these sites provide.

[thebitbotdotcom]

Use StatCounter for that.

[NicholasCollins]

Thanks, I am researching solutions because I dont want the page rank of the juice sites to drop and without growing and pushing them they should drop rank which of course would push less juice out to the sites your promoting. Even if the juice sites have tremendous backlinks to them my experience has shown that they will lose rank fast so i want to continue to push and promote and drive traffic while laying under the radar i guess. I will look into stat counter.

[MikeFriedman]

If you are talking about setting up a network for SEO purposes, i.e. backlinks, there is no need to drive traffic to these sites.

That is why Analytics is useless. You are just trying to boost up the rankings of your main sites. Yes, you want to keep some kind of analytics on your main sites, but I still wouldn't waste time with Google Analytics.

The only thing you need to monitor on these sites are the backlinks coming in to them. If you see some drop off, you to create more so the sites do not lose PR.

[Mike Anthony]

I Think I get where Nicholas is coming from and I like the analytical business approach. Nicholas for purpose of monitoring growth you can follow this with tools That analytics doesn't have to give you. You can monitor backlinks and PR which are the main indicators of your networks strength. In fact seoquake installed in Chrome or Firefox is going to give you alot of that just by visiting the sites.

Now if your sites are growing in traffic on their own then you might want to consider them kind of as a part of your money site group and treat them differently. However you are going to have to use separate analytic packages and make do with not having them all in one place because having them all under Google is exactly what you don't want. perhaps at some point you can look into paid services that allow their own metric tracking of multiple sites but google should be out or you won't have very many restful nights wondering what could happen. Tracking growth isn't worth the risk that they get deindexed.

[RevSEO]

As the Mike mentioned, if you can get away with not using Analytics DON'T.

Second, if you are building your own network don't even think about adding a the biggest footprint of them all, the same Google Analytics account.

Remember the idea of an SEO network is to reduce all possible footprints so that your network can never be "found" and then discredited. That means not registering your account with Analytics OR Webmaster Tools, etc.

Finally there's really no reason to use Analytics on these SEO networks. Do you care where traffic comes from? No. Is it important to find out visitor analytics? Not really. The whole point of an SEO network is to benefit your rankings.

That means you want to monitor things like pages indexed, backlinks, etc. Things that Analytics doesn't do anyways.

[Mike Anthony]

Originally Posted by NicholasCollins

Thanks, I am researching solutions because I dont want the page rank of the juice sites to drop and without growing and pushing them they should drop rank which of course would push less juice out to the sites your promoting.

Thats a legitimate concern. tracking as you know won't stop that from happening you just have to have techniques to continue to build which I guess will depend on what link building techniques you are aware of.

[NicholasCollins]

Thanks again, I have received some great take-aways.

This hits home..

'Tracking growth isn't worth the risk that they get deindexed.'

And i do have seoquake installed and yes that could be used just as fine.

For so many years GA has been apart of my arsenal for all my sites and not having it I feel is like a gaping hole of information for any project i start but I am starting to see the light and am new to setting up a network just for this type of promotions, thanks to all the Mikes and the SEO guys for their input. I appreciate it greatly and will act on the advice.