Wednesday 25 September 2013

Send a Specific URL Traffic Analysis to Anyone (A very Old Trick)

By +Mina Adly Younan
This week I knew that my SEO curiosity is limitless. I got frenzy on Fiverr hiring seo clerks to do some White (and Black, grey, and blue) Hat SEO to some of my sandbox websites just to understand what techniques I might be missing.

I was not impressed much with most of them, and the good ones were just creating me profiles with backlinks to my sites on Amazon, Flirt, Opestreetmap, bookcrossing, audioboo, freecode, miraja, care2, qik, and other alike sites with PR5 to 7

Others spinned one or two of my sites' posts and republished them with links on other guest posting blogs. The rest just forwarded me visitors (that is Black Hat of course because these visitors were forced to have my site opened on their browsers without their intentions.)

Until I found one gig that does a real White Hat SEO and believe it or not I got ranked in one day for 2/3 of the keywords I sent them. Plus, Traffic on the tested site was increased by 100% and all are natural organic search engine traffic.

How did they do it? They refused to tell.

Not only that, they also sent me what they called a Stats Center to monitor my traffic.
MY TRAFFIC!!

How Could They send me my Analytics Data?

I asked them, but they said it is their own Stats Center and refused to tell me about its name.
The link they sent me looked like this: http://goo.gl/#analytics/goo.gl/bYXVQk/all_time (this is an example) and when you open it you see a traffic analysis report like this:



The good thing is it was very simple to me to find out that this is not THEIR stats center it is simply google's stats center and you can have one for any site you Shorten. 

Google launched an URL shortening service in September 2010 called goo.gl. Originally the service was used internally to pass links within Google, but the service was expanded to include external links as well.

If you used your google account and went to goo.gl you can shorten any website to get a code like this goo.gl/bYXVQk.  

One important caveat. You can track anyone's goo.gl URL by adding .info to the end of it (or simply a "+" sign like this goo.gl/bYXVQk+. you will then be redirected to what they called the Stat center with a URL that looks like this http://goo.gl/#analytics/goo.gl/bYXVQk/all_time 

Now, Let's talk about what that link doesn't show you. You can't see who posted it. (Ok, I confess. It was me.) You can't see how many visitors visit haveresults.com total. You can only see how many clicked on the specific short URL to get there. 

So, that was simply what they did. First, they shortened my sandbox site on goo.gl. they took this link (did their own Backlinking with the URL as the href and my keywords as the anchor text, I still did not know how or where but I am sure it will eventually be indexed on Moz, or MajesticSEO, or Ahrefs, or any other backlinks trackers software). That is it, then sent me the "Stats Center" URL.