Segmenting Brand and Generic Paid Search Traffic in Google Analytics

Segmenting Brand and Generic Paid Search Traffic in Google Analytics

Thursday, June 26, 2014 | 11:09 AM

Labels: AdWords, Announcements, Features

Many advertisers with paid search campaigns advertise on queries mentioning their brand (e.g., “Motorola smartphone” for Motorola) and also on generic searches (e.g., “smartphone reviews”). Because the performance metrics for ads shown against brand and generic queries can be vastly different, many advertisers prefer to analyze these two groups separately.  For example, all else being equal, searches containing the advertiser’s brand name often have higher clickthrough-rates than those that don’t.

Automatic classification

To make analysis of brand and generic performance as easy as possible, we’re introducing a new feature which automatically identifies brand-aware paid search clicks tracked in Google Analytics. We use a combination of signals (including the clickthrough-rate, text string, domain name and others) to identify query terms which show awareness of your brand.  You can review our suggested brand terms and then accept or decline each of them. It’s also easy to add additional brand terms that we’ve missed. 

With the resulting list of brand terms, we classify your paid search traffic in GA so that you can split your “paid search” channel into two separate channels: “brand paid search” and “generic paid search”. This can be done both for Multi-Channel Funnels (for attribution purposes) and for the main Google Analytics channel grouping. See this straightforward step-by-step guide to get started.

Industry feedback

Back in 2012, George Michie from the Rimm-Kaufmann Group, a leading online marketing agency, called analyzing brand and generic paid search together “the cardinal sin of paid search”. We showed him a preview of our new solution and here’s his reaction:

"I've been arguing for many years that advertisers should look at their brand and generic paid search separately. There are massive differences in overall performance - but also in more specific areas, like attribution and new customer acquisition. 

Google Analytics now makes it a lot easier for advertisers to segment brand and generic paid search into separate channels. I'm sure this feature will help many more advertisers measure these important differences - and more importantly, take action on these new insights."

Getting started

Finally: note that this feature works for all paid search advertising, not just Google AdWords. It will roll out to all users in the coming weeks.

To get started, use the step-by-step guide to set up separate brand paid search and generic paid search channels. We’ve already suggested brand terms for every GA view with sufficient paid search traffic.

Posted by: Frank Uyeda, Software Engineer, Google Analytics

Things to keep in mind when looking to increase traffic.

Ad Traffic Quality Resource Center

Things to keep in mind when looking to increase traffic

Site optimization to increase traffic is usually grouped into two parts - Web enhancements and new traffic acquisition.

• Discussed Topics in Article
• Web enhancements
• New traffic acquisition

Web enhancements

Web enhancements, such as optimizing ad placement and navigation, can help increase traffic. We offer some tips to help you improve your website. Check out these tips to learn how fast-loading pages, relevant, fresh content, and effective mobile sites can help increase traffic to your website.
Publishers should be aware of the AdSense program policies and the Google Webmaster Guidelines and optimize their sites without violating any of the policies or quality guidelines. For example, Google ads, search boxes, and search results may not be:

• Integrated into a software application (does not apply to AdMob) of any kind, including toolbars
• Displayed in pop-ups or pop-unders
• Placed in emails, email programs, or chat programs
• Obscured by elements on a page
• Placed on any non-content-based page (Does not apply to AdSense for search or mobile AdSense for search)
• Placed on pages published specifically for the purpose of showing ads
• Placed on pages whose content or URL could confuse users into thinking it is associated with Google due to the misuse of logos, trademarks or other brand features
• Placed on, within, or alongside other Google products or services in a manner that violates the policies of that product or service

This list of prohibited activity is not intended to be exhaustive. Please consult the AdSense program policies and AdSense Terms and Conditions for a more comprehensive overview of policies. Ultimately, in order to promote and ensure a good experience for users and advertisers, clicks on Google ads must result from genuine visitor interest.

New traffic acquisition

Acquiring new traffic to your website is another common way to generate increased traffic. Common ways to do this include search engine optimization, advertising, and partnering with traffic providers.

Search engine optimization

We understand that you may look to search engine optimization to increase traffic. In order to help you ensure that the implemented search engine optimization is clean and adheres to Google policy, please read our Webmaster Guidelines (also referenced in the above “Web enhancements” section), which are best practices to follow when creating a site that Google can find, crawl, index, and understand. For a more in-depth guide to search engine optimization, we offer the Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide In addition, as mentioned in the Understanding traffic on your site article, Google Webmaster Tools enables you to submit all of your pages to the Google index, which can increase your visibility by optimizing your website for Google search.
Before you decide to work with any search engine optimizers we suggest the following:

• It’s best to ask for recommendations from webmasters that you personally know and trust or search for well-known optimizers with good reputations on the web. If possible, read what others have written about them on forums before proceeding to work with them.
• If you decide to go with an optimizer based on their reputation on the web, ask for examples of sites they have optimized. The sites should be as similar to yours as possible based on your content vertical, demographics, number of visits/month, etc.
• Make sure that the SEO won't make your site violate the Webmaster Guidelines, for example, by purchasing links to your site in order to increase its PageRank.

Other helpful tips and things to consider are outlined in this Search Engine Optimization help article.

Advertising

AdSense publishers are also welcome to use online advertising as a way to direct new users to their sites. However, in order to ensure a positive experience for users and advertisers, publishers that use any form of online advertising to pages with Google ads are required to comply with the spirit of our landing page quality guidelines. The three main components of a high quality landing page are: relevant and original content, transparency, and site navigability. Please read the use of online advertising Help Center article to learn more about each of these components.
We also prohibit the promotion of your site using the following techniques:

• spam emails
• comment spamming
• creation of fake forum profiles
• posting links on link farms and "private blog networks", link exchanges and social network spamming.

Partnering with traffic providers

Ultimately, you’re welcome to promote your site in any manner that complies with our program policies. However, AdSense publishers are ultimately responsible for the traffic to their ads, so if you choose to partner with a third-party service to increase traffic to your site, it’s critical that you monitor your reports closely to gauge the impact that each source has on your ad traffic.
There are many services out there that can increase traffic to your site, including pay-per-click solutions to connect advertisers and publishers, as well as search engines and directory sites. However, we’ve found that some of these services actually send artificial traffic to websites, despite their appearance. To deliver the traffic levels that their customers expect, these services often generate clicks and impressions using click bots, or by providing users incentives to visit sites or click on ads. For this reason, we strongly urge you to use caution when partnering with third-party traffic services. If you find that one of your traffic sources has suspicious activity, we recommend stopping or pausing your relationship with that traffic source to stop any traffic that may be invalid. We also encourage publishers to report any suspicious activity which they’ve detected on their site via the Invalid Clicks Contact Form.
Refer to the Proactive steps to prevent invalid activity article for more information about how to avoid partnering with low-quality traffic providers. Specifically, the traffic provider checklist can help guide your discussions with any potential traffic provider. This checklist provides a list of suggested questions to ask when you start to explore how you and a traffic provider can work together. Once you've spoken with a traffic provider and want to move forward, it’s also critical that you have the ability to monitor the traffic they are sending to your site.

Direct Traffic Definition.

THE TKG TEAM
SEO WEB DEVELOPMENT GLOSSARY

direct Traffic

Web definitions:

1. The number of visitors who directly accessed your site. Direct visits can be the result of bookmarks, browser home page, or manually typing in your domain URL. In other words, these visitors did not click on a search engine result, PPC ad, or link to access your site.
   http://www.tkg.com/seo-web-development-glossary
2. SOCIAL MEDIA STRATEGY:   BECAUSE CHECKING 50 TIMES A DAY FACEBOOK ISN'T STRATEGY.

copyblogger

by  James Chartrand 

What to Do When You’re Sick of Your Blog

Let’s talk about your blog.
You might just have mentally winced — blogs can be a painful topic.
You know you should have one, because everyone tells you so. You know you should write blog posts on a fairly consistent basis. And you know you should publish regularly too.
But you don’t.
Just thinking about blogging makes you cringe.
You’re not alone. A lot of business owners feel the same way, and for three good reasons:

1. They don’t know what to write about — maybe you don’t either? You think of ideas, but they all seem lame. It becomes stressful, and you start to dread writing for your blog. You might even stop blogging completely, hoping no one notices you haven’t updated your blog in weeks. (Maybe months.)
2. They can’t get past the first few paragraphs before quitting — sound familiar? When you do have a good idea and try to write a great post, it doesn’t take long before your motivation ebbs. You start thinking maybe it wasn’t such a hot idea after all. And now that you reread what you wrote, you feel your post sounds dumb, so you give up completely.
3. They aren’t confident about what they wrote — are you? Sometimes you do have a good idea and write about it, but when you’re done and read your post over, you don’t feel confident about it anymore. You think the writing’s terrible, or the post isn’t “good enough” to publish, or you feel nervous about what your readers might think of you when they read it.

These are huge blogging roadblocks, and they’re the reason that most business owners slowly find themselves beginning to dislike their blog.

A serious dilemma

More blog posts hit the trash can than business owners hit the “publish” button on.
The result?
The blog doesn’t get updated for weeks … sometimes months.
And when a post finally does get finished and that “publish” button gets clicked? The blog owner often suffers a sudden spike of fear the second after it happens, followed by an immediate wave of worry about what readers will think when they read the post.
It doesn’t surprise me. I don’t know many business owners who shout, “Yeah! I LOVE blogging!”
But that’s exactly what you should be shouting, because blogging creates attention, credibility, traffic, sales, and revenues for any type of business. Blogging means money, and I don’t know any business owner who wouldn’t cheer about that.
It’s a serious dilemma, and something has to be done.

A simple solution

Thankfully, there’s an easy, pleasant, pain-free solution for those who dread blogging, feel guilty about putting it off, or spend hours trying to write something while hating the obligation to post. Here’s what to do:
Don’t blog. At all.
When blogging becomes an activity that makes you feel tense, stressed out, frustrated and fed up, it’s time to call it quits. No joke — this is important.
Go on a blogging holiday, and allow yourself full, unadulterated permission to not write a damn thing.
Walk away from your blog.
Not permanently, of course. That’d be silly. (After all, there’s money involved.) You’ll come back to writing for your blog in a few weeks or so — and when you do, you’ll feel very differently about it.
But right now, you’re burnt out and stressed to the max. You need to step back and get some distance between you and that blog you hate.
Your sanity and health matter far more than churning out content.
Don’t worry; your blog’s not going to suffer. After all, how long has it been since you’ve written a blog post anyway? And your readers won’t yell at you for not posting something new. (They may not even notice you’re gone.)
Your traffic won’t disappear overnight either — this isn’t the apocalypse. Your Google Analytics numbers may drop a touch, but not immediately and not much. It’s a temporary dip you can recover from later on when you feel better.
The world won’t end.
This isn’t complete abandonment of your blog. It’s just a break, a holiday from writing blog posts, and everyone deserves that.

But what about all those ideas that will start flooding in?

Of course, this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be proactive or productive during your blogging holiday. You can stop writing, but you should still focus on something that benefits you and your blog in the meantime.
What should you do instead of stressing over blogging or trying to slog through writing yet another post you hate? Try this during your holidays:
Don’t write at all. Just capture your ideas.
That’s all.
Jot down the ideas that come to mind on their own, as they come to you. Don’t try to force it to squeeze out ideas. Don’t attempt any brainstorming sessions.
Forget about blogging and just let new blog post ideas come to you of their own accord.
Start carrying around a notepad. When those ideas start popping into your head (and they will), you’ll want to jot them down. Write a brief note or a sentence or two.
You can use the Notes feature of your smartphone, a voice memo app, or send yourself emails, like I do.
It’ll take some time. At first, you might not have many ideas at all. (Perhaps even none). If you do have ideas, they might not be very good ones. Jot them down anyway.
As your stress eases away the longer you’re on holiday, you’ll find yourself having more ideas, and better ideas … usually when you least expect them.

• Standing in line and suddenly think of something interesting? Jot it down.
• In the shower and something comes to you? Stick a hand out, dry it off, then write yourself a quick note. (Or buy some shower markers!)
• Driving along and something comes to mind? Pull over and make a quick voice memo. Send yourself a text message. Scribble notes on the back of a receipt.

A few easy things you should do while you’re taking time away

You don’t want to completely slack off. Capturing ideas is nice, but you can still be proactive about your blog, even while on holidays.
Do the smart thing first: enjoy your time off.
Take advantage of it; you need it.
Play. Rest. Do fun activities. Reward yourself. Screw off. You need this to recharge your batteries.
But every day, before you go play, schedule in a short half hour to hang out on social media.
Here’s why this is crucial to your rehabilitation: It’s very easy to forget that your blog posts are read by actual human beings, individual people with names and faces and feelings. It’s far, far too easy to start to think of them as “audience” — a vague, shapeless, faceless mass.
You need to reconnect with your audience as individuals.
So go hang out on Facebook or Twitter or G+. Chat with your audience, those loyal fans and followers. Restore friendships, rebuild neglected connections, see some old “friends,” joke around and laugh a bit. Remember who these people are.
While you’re hanging out …
Look back through your archives and revisit old posts.
You’ll certainly find some you don’t like so much or that weren’t very well written. That’s cool — you’ve come a long way since then, and now you can make a list of which posts to rework into better ones that you can republish. (Reduce, reuse, recycle, after all.)
Keep an eye out for old posts you really enjoyed or that had a great response.
Remember what you liked about them in the first place, and share them with your social media fans — slip in a quick, “Here’s an oldie but a goodie,” and link to that old post you found.
Ask for commentary from your followers, and pay attention to what they say.
Find out what readers liked most, or which points really struck a chord.
Ask them what they would love more of and would like less of, or whether there are new topics they’d love to hear about. You’ll gather great feedback you can put to good use when your blogging holidays are over.
Here’s an extra perk you probably haven’t considered yet, but it’s important: Your followers will get to reconnect with YOU, now that you’re paying attention to them again.
They’ll remember why they became fans in the first place.
Hey, you’re someone they liked! And not only are you chatting with them, you’re sharing good posts they either enjoyed before, or that they hadn’t yet read, or that they’d forgotten about but sure could put to good use now.
It’s a win-win-win, all around.

Want to know why this entire blogging holiday experiment will work?

You may be doubtful that not writing at all and just hanging around on social media for half an hour a day will eventually bring you back to writing.
After all, a lot of the advice out there tells you to build a daily writing routine, and to write every day at the same time, even if you’re not producing good work.
Even if you hate it.
Even if it’s painful.
Truthfully, that’s stupid advice. It’s akin to banging your finger with a hammer every day thinking that one morning, you’ll like the feeling and want to bang it harder.
It’s true that writing every day at the same time is an excellent idea because it does train your brain to write on demand. But forcing yourself to write when you’re in a hugely negative emotional state only reinforces that you hate every second of it.
Your brain makes the association: writing = bad.
And since your brain’s job is to help you avoid bad stuff, it’ll do whatever it can to get you to stop writing. Usually, the self-sabotage it creates is so effective you eventually can’t write at all.
Instead of fighting your brain, humor it. Listen to it.
Stop writing now before your brain heaps a bunch more sabotage and roadblocks onto your blog-writing efforts.
Your brain will heave a sigh of relief that you’ve finally paid attention, and it’ll be quite happy to let you just jot down your ideas instead.
After all, your brain sends you those ideas in the first place. It’ll approve of your decision!
By taking a break from writing and focusing on capturing ideas instead, you’ll accomplish several beneficial goals in one fell swoop:

1. You won’t stress over forgetting any good ideas that come along, and you can keep them handy for later.
2. You’ll put distance between you and the psychological traps holding you back from writing, so that you can examine them from a more objective perspective.
3. You won’t feel like you’re slacking off completely, because you’re actually being proactive about your blog (even if you’re not writing).
4. You won’t feel guilty anymore about not updating your blog with new content. Blame me, if you need to: “James TOLD me not to write!” The pressure’s off.
5. You’ll rest, recharge your batteries, and rejuvenate your creativity back up to optimal levels — it’s probably stretched to the max right now.

But you have to commit fully

At first, it might be tough to not write.
You might feel guilty you’re not giving it a shot or feel like you have an obligation to your readers.
You might think the situation isn’t as bad as it really is. You might think, “Okay, I’ll try writing this post,” after a few days.
For the love of Pete, don’t do it.
Go on immediate, full-time leave.
You don’t even need to write an “I’m taking a break” announcement for your readers. No one needs to know what’s up. It’s none of their business. And in the grand scheme of life, it’s not important.
What is important is getting you back to feeling better.
Once you’ve been on your blogging holiday for a while, you’ll start to realize you feel more relaxed. You’ll be able to look at the situation more objectively, and even positively.
You’ll start to feel differently about this whole blogging thing.

One of four things will happen

It may take two weeks; it may take two months. Maybe more.
No matter how long it takes, there are only four possible outcomes to this blog holiday experiment:

1. You’re itching to write and excited to get back to it full force. You’ll want to snatch ideas from your list and draft them out like a crazy content machine. (Don’t go overboard, of course. You don’t want to gorge after you’ve been starving. No good comes of that.)
2. You still hate blogging and are plagued by a swift return of writer’s block, stress, guilt, and self-doubt. The experiment didn’t work. That’s excellent! You’ve learned that you need some help getting past these roadblocks, and you can contact a coach who’ll help you smash through them, once and for all.
3. You feel better about writing and don’t have any stress, but you realize this blogging thing takes too much time to create a post. That’s excellent as well! This usually signals a lack of skills, and anyone can improve those. Take a writing course to learn how to speed up your writing process, and you’ll be off to the races.
4. You have no issues anymore, but you’re still just not feeling the love. Fantastic! You’ve just realized that you probably shouldn’t be writing your own posts in the first place. Hire a professional blogger (I hear these guys are great), and hand over the ideas you’ve collected. Your new writer can dive straight in and write on your behalf.

Regardless of which of the four outcomes occur, you’ve won the blogging game.
You’ve shed stagnant, negative stress that dragged you down. You’ve rested and are back to good mental health.
And you’ve made some discoveries about yourself and your blog.
You have options at hand, and every single one is a better alternative than what you’d been doing … which was likely slogging it out, hating every minute, or silently dreading writing for your blog.
Your blogging holiday created positive change.
And change is always a good thing, don’t you think?
Flickr Creative Commons Image via Doug McAbee

About the Author: If you want to train for better writing skills (and a better business), check out the Damn Fine Words writing course. Designed to bring you business results and brought to you by professional writer James Chartrand of Men with Pens, it’s guaranteed to help you reach your goals. Click here learn more now.

Editor's note: The links to James's course are affiliate links. We're proud to help James get the word out about her course, which is terrific.

Ben Norman's SEO course: Day 7 - Blogs & RSS.

Ben Norman's SEO Made Easy Range

|  Main Site   |  SEO Blog   |  DIY SEO   |

7 Day Search Engine Optimisation Course

Day 7 - Blogs & RSS.   Blog and RSS are two terms you will more than likely have heard of. Now the reason I am including them is because search engines love unique and fresh content and Blogs give them just that. Now having a blog is something you need to be able to commit time to as you need to keep it up to date for it to remain effective and cast you in the right light. Blogging doesn't have to be massively time consuming but it is about giving information and being seen to be the go to people in your industry. I find with my company many of the people that come through have been on our blog looking at what we say what we have done etc and it has proved to be a good tool at showing how good we really are. You could for example if you were a camera shop you could have a blog which contained reviews of all the new cameras coming out with pictures and write-ups and by optimising the blog post with the camera name and number in the title chances are you could appear high in the rankings for that term. With our blog we find we can do a post and within minutes it is being ranked by Google and more often than not for the terms in our title tag. It is worth noting this is with long tail terms you are not going to do a post with "secured loan" as the title and get a high position of the bat. I always recommend WordPress for people looking to set up blogs on their website as it is totally free and very easy to install just follow the 5 step instruction process. Once installed it is just as easy to customise and a theme can be installed for free or if you want one that will fit in with your website you can have one designed for it through somewhere like Elance for about £100. When you have your blog installed people can then sign up to your RSS feed which means that every time you update your blog they will get it delivered straight to their RSS reader meaning it is even easier to stay in touch with them. Blogs are something that I can't recommend enough as when used properly can really give you the edge over your competition and show you as the go to company in your niche. I hope you have enjoyed this course and like to receive feedback as i am always updating it and like to ensure it contains what people want. So if you have a idea, feel something else should be added please get in touch.   What Next?   Thats the end of this short course but keep an eye on your inbox for more emails from me. Alternativly keep an eye on my blog for more tip and help.

4 factores por los que no me gusta el SEO.

4 factores por los que no me gusta el SEO

Publicado el 7 febrero, 2014 por Félix Román - LaPrimera.net en Marketing Internet 18 Comments

Home» Marketing Internet » 4 factores por los que no me gusta el SEO

Una de las preguntas que más recibimos en LaPrimera.net es: “¿Por qué recomendáis publicidad de pago en Facebook Ads y Adword para Vídeo por encima del SEO que proporciona tráfico gratis?”

Desde mi opinión personal y experiencia propia voy a enumerarte los factores por los que considero que el SEO no sirve si es tu principal fuente de tráfico:

1. El SEO es algo que NO puedes controlar. Por más que me digan que usan técnicas amigables con Google y que han sobrevivido a todas las actualizaciones hasta el momento (Pinguino, Panda, Colibrí) nada te asegura que mañana Google cambie su algoritmo y el ranking de tus sitios web baje muchísimo
2. Cuesta tiempo y trabajo. Posicionarte por una buena palabra clave en un nicho competitivo usualmente tarda meses e incluso años, por el contrario posicionarte para palabras claves de pequeña competencia (larga cola) demora mucho menos, pero necesitas muchas más para conseguir un número de visitas aceptable.
3. Tiempo de mercado. En el tiempo que se tarda en posicionar una página para una palabra clave que me envíe una cantidad aceptable de tráfico, yo ya he probado si un producto funciona o no, como responde la gente, como lo puedo mejorar, que puedo añadir, que puedo quitar y cientos de cosas más utilizando tráfico de pago.
4. No contribuye a un negocio real. Si dependes sólamente del SEO no tienes un negocio. Un negocio es aquel en el que inviertes 1€ y generas 1,50€ y por ende lo puedes escalar a donde tu quieras. El tráfico con SEO no permite esto en un periodo de tiempo razonable.

En fin, tal y como dije al principio si el SEO es tu única fuente de tráfico para tus sitios web, te recomiendo pensarlo dos veces y empezar a buscar nuevas alternativas. Créeme que no te arrepentirás
Saludos.
Félix Román

Ben Norman's SEO Made Easy Range: Day 2 - Keyword Research.

Ben Norman's SEO Made Easy Range

|  Main Site   |  SEO Blog   |  DIY SEO   |

7 Day Search Engine Optimisation Course

Day 2 - Keyword Research.   Keyword Research is the most important part of any well oiled (and profitable) campaign. It is also normally the most over looked. It stands to reason that no-one will know your market like you and that you will indeed know best. But do not let yourself become tunnel visioned and ensure you do not skip this step by saying "I know what keywords I need to be ranked for so don't need to do it". If you fall in to this trap you run the risk of missing out on finding your killer phrases and losing out on massive amounts of traffic. The first part of finding your keywords is to get a list of the keywords you believe are going to be the keywords your prospective clients would use to find your website. Once you have this list of keywords you need to do 2 things. Number 1 order the phrases by relevance (are the phrases really indicative of what you do or just mildly on topic, if mildly get rid of them) and also search volume (the number of times that keyword is searched for) and number 2 remove the vanity phrases. Vanity phrases are the phrases which people go after without thinking about it properly. For example a classic vanity phrase for me to use would be "SEO" which I have no doubt would bring in lots of traffic but most of it would be off target and not relevant for me so lots of effort to try and get ranked for it for not allot of payoff. For example they may be really searching for things such as "SEO Jobs" and "SEO Forum" both of which would be off target for me. You now need to find out the amount of searches for your selected keywords and for that you are going to need a little help so, follow the link and sign up for a free trial there are other keyword services out there but Wordtracker is renowned as being the market leader. The link I have given you will give you a free trial but it is one of those tools that if you are serious about doing this you should purchase. Once signed up and logged in it is a simple as pasting in your seed terms and letting Wordtracker do its thing. Now you can also get Wordtracker to suggest other relevant phrases and this is normally the part where you find a few new phrases you either hadn't thought of or that do not have a massive amount of competing pages and so will be easier to rank for. Either way I'm sure there will be a few "well I never would have thought of that's". Now you need a copy of your sitemap and you need to map the relevant phrases to the most relevant pages of your website for them to be on. Do not clutter your pages with lots of keywords, you should be keeping each page down to between 1 and 3 search phrases. If you use too many phrases on each page you run the risk of missing them all. You must ensure that you are also realistic with your keywords and stick to two or three word search phrases to ensure you are going to be able get some results. We will go into more detail on what to do with the keywords when we get to the On Page Optimisation module but until then focus on putting your keyword list together mapping them to your pages.   Tomorrow   Tomorrow we will be looking at website analysis and competition research.

How to Protect Your Blogger Blog from Spam Comments and Spam Traffic.

How to Protect Your Blogger Blog from Spam Comments and Spam Traffic-

REHMAT · FEB 17, 2013 · 9 COMMENTS

When your blog is subjected to spam comments and spam traffic, its performance greatly reduces. It is also possible that Google may kick it out from the ranking competition when it is harmed or invaded by spam comments. The spam spiders and bots keep crawling your blog all the time and as a result, its load time dramatically increases. So it is extremely important that you must take affective steps to protect your blog from spam attack by stopping spam comments and traffic flow which is mostly caused by your own mistakes.

From Where Spam Traffic Comes?

Spam traffic comes from spammy websites which find your URL somewhere on the web. It mostly happens when you place your blog’s link on a spam website. In case of Blogger blogs, when your blog starts receiving spam traffic, you can notice it in your Blogger dashboard as Top traffic sources.

In above screenshot, the top traffic source is Google for my blog. In your blog’s case, there may be some sites like Facebook, Twitter or any friend’s blog also if your blog is new. But if you notice a strange site, then you must check it out by searching information about the site in Google that either it is a reputed one or spam.

So What to Do if Your Blog Receives Traffic from a Spam Site

Spam sites send traffic (bots) to your blog when URL of your blog is placed anywhere on that sites. In such a case, find out the exact URL from where traffic is coming. In most cases, the URL is placed there by yourself. Most bloggers do this and place their blog URL for getting a backlink without knowing or caring about the site. If you believe that you haven’t placed the URL there, then contact the administration of that site and request them for removal of the link. In most cases, it works and your link is removed.

Some Tips to Protect Your Blog from Spam Attack

To make it sure that your blog is exposed to minimum spam attacks, consider below tips:

Never Post Your URL Everywhere

It is a bad habit of bloggers that they tend to post their URL anywhere when they find an opportunity. Yesbacklinks are important for your blog but it doesn’t mean that all links are valuable. If you post your blog URL to any spam directory or website, then you make a very big mistake. Spam traffic, which are indeed automated bots, starts crawling your URLs frequently and as a result, your servers go down. You must know the fact that slower load time of your blog kills its ranking and you lose the valuable traffic from search engines. So my first tip is that never post your blog URL everywhere on the web and build backlinks from respected directories only.

Deal Strictly With Comments

The most spam attempts on blogs and websites are brought through comments. Many SEO companies send automatic bots to your blog which attempt to leave spam comments containing links. These spam comments mostly attack WordPress blogs. Blogger blogs also receive spam comments but the ratio is much less or negligible as compared to WordPress blogs. You must take precautionary measures to keep spam comments away from your blog, otherwise they may affect your ranking in SERPs negatively. If you are on WordPress, then you must use SI Captcha plugin on your blog and turn on moderation. Blogger users must modify comment settings for their blog properly. If you haven’t modified the setting for comments on your Blogger blog, then view this screenshot, it will help you in modifying settings for comments on your blog.

While using WordPress, beware that most spam comments look natural. Most new bloggers approve and respond these comments by considering them natural, but they are spam comments indeed. This post (http://geteverything.org/add-facebook-you-might-also-like-slider-to-your-blogger-blog/) is an example of a WordPress blog post at which all comments are spam and the owner hasn’t only approved the comments, but has replied each comment also.

How to Identify Spam Comments?

Sometimes, spam comments even bypass captcha security on your blog and comments are left. If comment moderation is turned on, then you can approve good comments individually. To identify spam comments on your blog, simply compare the comment with your post topic. If it is relevant, then approve it, otherwise never. Mostly, spam comments are composed in such a way that they look relevant to any kind of post and trick the moderators. i.e. most likely, moderators approve comments which say “nice post, thank you for sharing” or “i love your articles” etc. So never ever approve such comments.

How to Fight Against Human Spammers

Human spammers are more dangerous than automated spam bots because they can read captchas and can post their links on your blog. To fight against such spammers, moderate each comment on your blog. Though it will require some effort from your side but your blog will stay away from cancer of spam.

These were some tips for protecting your blog from spam comments and spam traffic. I hope that it will help you in protecting your blog. Good luck!