However the main reason I find people dont put it in, is because it is such a performance drag. I have seen sites that load in under 2 seconds, when the Google Analytics code is added, that the load time rockets up to over 10 seconds.

I am sure you are well aware of the 5 second rule, where if your site hasnt loaded and grabbed your visitors attention in 5 seconds or less, you have now lost that potential client.

I use Piwik for site statistics. It’s a free PHP script that provides the same kind of information as Google Analytics without having Google looking over your shoulder. Being a PHP script, you have to do the installation yourself but it’s pretty simple. I recommend putting it on its own domain, though it will happily run in a subdomain. You could install it in a subfolder on an existing domain but it might impact the page loading speed of that domain, especially on a shared hosting account.

Gary

I want to thank you for your detailed explanation as I was not even aware that Google does not really approve of small affiliate sites.

The blog title really intrigued me and thanks again for sharing your expertise

StatCounter returned results in under an hour. I’ll leave it on my site for a couple more weeks but as soon as I get indexed, GA is gone.

That’s for the tip advising us not to put up any affiliate links on our sites.

I had heard it mentioned once before not to put ads on our sites and I totally forgot about it until now. Removing Amazon widget, saving for another time.

Thanks again for a great post.

But I do know that if you’re looking for valuable metrics on performance and ranking, there are plenty of other sites out there like Alexa and QuantCast where you can install similar tracking codes on your site to deliver more meaningful metrics regarding search rankings, top keywords searched, and the demographics of your customers.

New sites can get indexed quite quickly by Google, rise in the ranks and start earning almost immediately (if they have ads). When Google realises they’re affiliate sites, they drop in the rankings and earnings go down. And sometimes the site gets sandboxed. But that can happen regardless of the software you use to build a site. Webmasters need to think in terms of months in looking at how a site is perfoming not the initial blip that can happen after a new site launches.

SiteBuilder Elite allows you to configure your site in many ways and you can have it download articles to your pages or upload your own articles for more unique content. It also allows you to drip feed new pages to a site on autopilot so it looks like there’s a human behind it adding a couple of new pages every few days. It does a ton of other stuff too.

Gary.

Even worse is the fact that while you may be smart enough to run your own license of a different analytics solution, a large number of other sites don’t. So when your website or backlinking software, etc. reach out to the community, Google is still tracking your connections, logging the unique identifiers, and connecting the dots across numerous sites.

Google provides us with some valuable tools and information for our projects. However, for the reasons you illustrated and more, those of us engaged in marketing activities should take precautionary measures such as logging out of our Google accounts and clearing cookies when we’re done using their tools – for starters. I’m at the point where I do almost everything behind a quality paid proxy service. And when I’m running submission software I do it while connected to the WiFi at one of several local Starbucks. I feel more protected and it gives me an excuse to leave the house and get a good coffee buzz going.

Happy New Year!