Sometimes people think I am a cynic when I mention things like "avoid Google Analytics," but you never really understand how Google perceives the web until they chose to try to wipe you out. Jay Weintraub recently posted about how he was permanently banned from AdWords because one of his employees accessed his company account AND their personal account from the same IP address.

A person who has access to the company's AdWords accounts has their own AdWords account. They are a good employee and don't work on their personal project at the office, but as a good employee they do work on your business while at home. By accessing both AdWords accounts on the same machine, Google decides both accounts are the same person despite their being different. Worst case, the employee breaks the rules with their personal account. The employer finds their campaigns stopped and can't get them back online.

There was a point in time when some people who practiced PPC claimed that it was safer than SEO, but in the face of

• permanent account bans
• falsely linking together accounts
• mystery meat quality scores
• people stealing your ad copy
• Google coming out and directly stating they dislike certain business models

it is certainly a bit harder to claim that PPC is a safe and effective long-term marketing strategy.

Worse yet though, if Google is willing to ban people paying them millions of dollars, what happens to those who publish AdSense ads and are dependant on Google for revenue as well? What happens to those who are dominating the organic rankings without paying their Google tax?

If Google connects up all that data to use against their advertisers, surely they are using the same data to hand out punishment to other parties as well. Just by using AdSense you make your business more reliant on Google (and eventually more likely to be penalized by Google). Just by using Google Analytics you are leveling the competition field for everyone except yourself. And the problem there is that you can't get away with many of the things that your competitors do.

How many emails like this could I send out before my site would get banned?

My threshold and the threshold for Sallie Mae are two different numbers. I wonder if I offer PageRank 6 (and above) bloggers a free membership to my site if they linked to me (like Demand Media does) if I would be deemed a spammer?

As Google's stranglehold on the web grows (Google just closed the DoubleClick deal - giving them access to a lot more affiliate data) the solution to remove yourself from risks associated with Google's influence is to create a business that is not reliant on Google...a brand and a destination. But to do that you really need to ignore Google's advice.

And if you are an end consumer and searcher, you are hosed already. Ads already track you and know who you are, and Google has patents to target ads to leverage and exploit your mental weaknesses:

Examples of information that could be useful, particularly in massive multiplayer online RPG’s, may be the specific dialogue entered by the users while chatting or interacting with other players/characters within the game. For example, the dialogue could indicate that the player is aggressive, profane, polite, literate, illiterate, influenced by current culture or subculture, etc. Also decisions made by the players may provide more information such as whether the player is a risk taker, risk averse, aggressive, passive, intelligent, follower, leader, etc. This information may be used and analyzed in order to help select and deliver more relevant ads to users.

Hat tip to Andy for the link to Jay's post.

• Reciprocal links really started getting punished after there were tools to automate link exchanges and link exchange hubs developed.
• Nofollow was a direct response to automated blog comment spam software.
• Directories really started getting punished after there were tools to automate submissions and there were lists of sites to submit to.
• Article directories started getting punished after there were tools to automate submissions and there were lists of sites to submit to.
• A blog called Promote My Site offers a list of thousands of social media sites. And there are plenty of automated submission tools too.

Google Analytics came out with a novel benchmarking feature which compares your site's performance to other websites in your field. You can see this benchmark data ONLY IF you are willing to aggregate your data into the pool of anonymized data.

The best sites in your industry probably are not using Google Analytics, and those who do are probably not benchmarking against average, so you are essentially benchmarking your site against a random sample of the bottom half of your industry. I guess such a measurement has purpose, unfortunately I fail to see it.

I hope that while so many people are out smelling the flowers, someone is taking the time to plant some. - Herbert Rappaport

The line between being clever and giving out too much information, can be seen here.

Recently Google's Kevin Marks was interviewed by cNet, where he said:

OK, stop and think about your application. Do you really need to be a standalone site? Do you really want to write user registration code, or would you be better off taking your application and bringing these other sites where there are lots of users already and where they have already expressed both their personal information and their connections to other people?

The answer to that is of course you want to be your own destination. Writing registration code once means you can re-use it over and over again on various projects. If you can program a successful widget or application then you are not the type who thinks registration code is a roadblock.

Some of the most successful viral applications (like Paypal and YouTube) leveraged other platforms for growth, but a large part of their success was that they also chose to be destinations.

If you create a destination vs exclusively being a platform on another site, you...

• have more direct contact with your customers (which often creates new revenue streams)
• have greater organic growth opportunities due to a wider variety of organic distribution channels (rather than being someone else's user generated content)
• make it easier for reporters to contact you. Public relations is huge for spreading viral stories and growing viral networks (look at how many times Plentyoffish was in the press)
• create something that is easy to link at, where you control the link equity and attention and use it to profit as you wish (ads, market new related ideas, change your business model, etc.)
• can extend your offering out into related fields and/or create a premium service
• are more likely to receive funding if needed and can sell your business for a higher price point (since your business has more of what Warren Buffet considers a moat around it)

Consider some of the add ins that sold for millions or billions of dollars because they chose to become destinations

• If Paypal was not a destination, eBay could have killed them and/or bought them for a small fraction of their potential value.
• If Del.icio.us or MyBlogLog was just a Firefox extension would Yahoo! have bought them?
• If Feedburner was a browser plug-in of some sort would Google have paid an estimated $100 million for them?
• If YouTube was not a destination could they have competed with Google Video and got bought for $1.65 billion?

Overture, which pioneered the paid search field, once had a dominant market-share, but was afraid of becoming a search destination because they thought that it could cost them syndication partnerships. The day AOL signed on to syndicate Google's ads, Overture became irrelevant as a business force. They bought a couple search engines in an attempt to become a destination, but it was too little too late. And Overture was bought by Yahoo! for about 1% of what Google is worth today. The pioneer in the paid search model that drives the current web economy sold for about the same price as a marginally profitable free video hosting site, largely because Overture failed to become a destination. Oops.