Do you trust SEOMoz with your Google Analytics data?
-
This data is so so valuable...
-
You need to look at the bigger picture and not rely solely on Google Analytics, SEOMoz or any one tool in-particular. In the case of Google Analytics some users may not be tracked (not got JavaScript enabled) or you may be counting your own clicks on through your website if you don't exclude your IP address from Google Analytics.
In regards to trusting SEOMoz with your Google analytics data, I think you can. As previously mentioned SEOMoz is a community of SEO's and the tools that SEOMoz provide can be enhanced by linking your accounts.
-
Thanks Rand, that's put my mind a little more at ease - I just couldn't find any information about confidentiality.
-
Rand is mostly correct. The GA data you see in the product is the only data we request from GA. In fact, we only store a subset of that data. Some data, such as the data on the Find New Keywords page, is freshly pulled from GA each page request and never stored on our servers. When a campaign or an account is deleted all of our stored GA data is deleted at that moment. Don't worry though, if you recreate that campaign or a similar one we will re-fetch all your historical traffic data.
The method with which we access your GA data is protected by an authorization protocol called OAuth2. OAuth2 allows us to access your data without having to ever see or know your password. Basically, we get a token from Google that says this user gives SEOmoz, and only SEOmoz, access to a specific set of data (called a scope). The scope we use is the read-only Google Analytics scope, meaning we can only read your GA data and that's it. Further, this token from Google is only good for data requests from specific servers of ours.
-
Totally fair question - I'll add a few thoughts from our end:
- Right now, the only GA data we pull for accounts is what you see in the product. We're not taking out or using anything else behind the scenes, nor storing anything other than what you see. Being totally TAGFEE, I will say that in the future, we probably should start using some anonymous aggregations of data to help improve the product, run some testing and possibly long term, offer the ability to share your data anonymously in exchange for some sort of benchmarking/comparison (we'd obviously talk about this a lot more and you'd need to opt-in - we'd never do it without permission).
- Once an account is deleted, we remove its data within 6 months (sometimes sooner - only reason we keep it is in case of account re-activation, where folks don't want to lose stuff).
- We have network admins on call 24/7, so if anything unusual should happen, we can quickly address the problem.
- To date, we've had no intrusion attempts other than to the main WWW site (for injections of URLs - ugh to link spammers making the name "SEO" look bad).
- We have never sold ANY customer data ever to anyone for any reason, nor have we ever attempted or offered to do so. We do, obviously, make our link graph available via OSE, but that's public on the web (just hard to access in a scalable format).
I will ask one of our engineering folks to jump on this thread and provide some information about our security and encryption (probably not details, as that would be counter-productive, but at least a broad explanation).
My final note would be that traffic data via GA, while certainly important and private, hasn't typically been a target of hackers/malware/phishing schemes/etc. The value to outsiders is pretty minimal, even direct competitors (with a few rare exceptions).
-
I trust them. I highly doubt the will be trying to sell my Analytics information to my competitors. Besides, they are gathering the information using the GA API (I think).
Do you trust Google with your Analytics knowing they benchmark your performance and show it anonymously to others? Many large companies don't trust Google and choose Ominture Site Catalyst.
Don't worry, you are fine trusting SEOMoz with your analytics. They don't even have your GA password.
-
Truth be told, you do not want to trust anyone with anything. Movies, television and stories are filled with tales of trust and betrayal.
With that said, if you are going to trust a company, then SEOmoz has all the right indicators.
1. It is the largest SEO-focused site in the world in terms of traffic.
2. The CEO, Rand, has been trusted to represent the US in international matters related to SEO
3. SEOmoz began in 2004. 8 years is a long time in today's internet world. SEOs from around the world have entrusted SEOmoz since that time.
You can always go with the TRUST NO ONE approach. If you own or perform work for any small business type of site, your are trusting a lot more people then you realize.
-
Do you own your own server? If not, you are paying for hosting with a provider. My hosting provider has 200 employees, many of whom are network engineers or various level techs. A large number of these people have full access to your server and logs.
-
Do you have employees? You are trusting them with your data.
-
How secure is your site really? Numerous of the world's largest companies have had serious security breaches. What type of security testing have you performed on your site? I am not speaking of running some sort of free or inexpensive testing, but rather have a security expert examine your site's code line by line looking for vulnerabilities.
-
How secure is your office network? Your laptop or pc's? Your internet network? Your internet browser?
I take security very seriously, moreso then most of my colleagues. I have custom built Dell laptops with Intel vPro chips for encrypted hard drives and CompuTrace Complete for the ability to disable and recover lost or stolen laptops. I have a paper shredder in the office, and I use it. I maintain my own dedicated server with custom scripts for added protection. These are just a few examples of basic security practices.
I choose to trust SEOmoz with my data. I would suggest if you perform a full security audit on your business practices, SEOmoz data sharing is not likely to be even a blip on the radar compared to the numerous gaping holes many businesses share. With that said, this would be a great time for a SEO staff member to share the practices used to secure our data.
-
-
I do ...I hope they are on the up and up! I don't mind them selling it in aggregate but hopefully things that are supposed to be confidential or confidential. I doubt they could have gotten this big by doing bad stuff.
Greg
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Creating a campaign and connecting it to Google Analytics
I want to create three campaigns in Moz and connect them to my Google Analytics account. However, two of the domains I am trying to create campaigns for are joined in Google Analytics. Do I need to separate the two in Google in order to create separate campaigns for each in Moz?
Moz Pro | | ERKSPAL0 -
Is SEOmoz spider ignoring my redirect?
My client was previously serving their website from both a .co.uk and a .com domain. The DNS for each of these domains was pointing to the same place, rather than redirecting. I saw this as a potential duplicate content problem so I set the .co.uk to 301 redirect on to the .com. As a user, the 301 seems to be working correctly. However, now that I have done this, SEOmoz is picking up thousands of "inbound" links from the .co.uk domain. Essentially, every single link on the internal site, is being duplicated in my stats as an inbound link as well. It appears that the spider is ignoring the redirect. I'm not sure if it's a legitimate issue that will upset Google too, or if it's just a bug with SEOMoz's spider.
Moz Pro | | MadisonSolutions0 -
What's the future of SERP Tracking? And... Is SEOMoz's SERP Rank Tracking in compliance with Google Adwords API Terms of Service?
My question is: Is SEOMoz's SERP Rank Tracking in compliance with Google Adwords API Terms of Service? Background: The reason I ask is because Raven Tools is now removing their SERP Reporting tool because it uses scraped Google position data. So, it looks like SEO's will either have to find a new rank tracking tool or find new ways to traffic the effects that rankings have on a website traffic volumes. For instance, there is a way to get the position a search results was in Google when it was clicked. We could create a secondary profile in Google Analytics for each client and use a custom filter to record the position that the keywords was in when the search result was clicked ( http://www.seomoz.org/blog/show-keyword-position-using-filters-and-advanced-segments ) Or perhaps we'll have to use Google Webmaster Tools' SEO Report to get data somehow ( http://support.google.com/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1308626 ) What are your thoughts on this? As you know, ranking data is still a great way to show clients if they are gaining or losing visibility in the search engines. It helps SEO's to report how effective their efforts have been. Because other ranking software companies uses Adwords API data to show the keyword search volume and advertiser competition of a keyword, they can not or eventually will not be able to use scraped ranking data any more. But, if another rank tracking tool out there doesn't need to be in compliance with the Adwords API TOS because they don't use that API to show search volume and advertiser competition, they can still technically provide their ranking data and not be violating any TOS, right? I'm just trying to understand the best way to continue reporting impact of organic keyword rankings on a website. Does the SEOMoz SERP Tracker comply with Adwords API? Is there another rank tracking tool out there that already is using Average Position data from the GWT SEO Report tool? Should we all just stop reporting rankings to clients altogether? Scott
Moz Pro | | OrionGroup2 -
How do you tell SEOmoz to ignore a subdomain?
We have a subdomain that I don't want to show up in our root SEOmoz campaign. How do I tell SEOmoz to ignore it?
Moz Pro | | wcsjohn0 -
SEOMoz Ranking section only showing my Homepage
My competition has a few pages showing for each term, but only my homepage shows for those terms. My SEO shouldn't be so bad that no inner pages show. What's happening? Do I have something set up incorrectly?
Moz Pro | | Ocularis0 -
How often does SEOMoz refresh their link analysis data?
I know that my link profile has changed within the last month, yet both SEOMoz campaign link analysis and Open Site Explorer have shown the exact same number of links for more than a month. Majestic SEO fluctuates as I would expect, but Moz data is unchanged.
Moz Pro | | Aggie0 -
Problem with our connection to your Google Analytics
It is the second time in less then a month when i get that error message. The first time I just removed the connection and re-added it. Is there any other way to fix it? is it the problem on my end or is it on SEOMOZ side?
Moz Pro | | SirMax0 -
How do you use SEOmoz
I'm a newbie here. I've got a week left on my free trail. I really like SEOmoz, I might even love it a bit. 🙂 I'm trying to justify the cost. I usually don't spend money on my Internet Marketing. I've done it through finally buying some tools to help me get there. Massive change in the last year. I'm a long ways from getting rich YET though. 🙂 I've gone from $30 a month to $1000 a month in a year. So I think I'm on my way now. I'm trying to figure out why I should continue my subscription and actually start paying for it. If I were a developer I can certainly see why but the cost would so go way up. 🙂 I'm in the lowest level package with only five websites. I have 10 I'm working on. I know that's probably five to many at one time. I'm having a little trouble justifying the cost at this time. At my income level $100 a month is significant. I can see the value of seeing where my competition has backlinks. Sometimes my competition is Cnet. haha Well, I can beat them on a specific page at times. Hmm, can I search the URL list for links? Perhaps i can if I export it. That didn't occur to me. Now that could be of use if I can find my keywords. If their link is on Amazon though, I'm going to have trouble getting a link there. 🙂 Maybe I should work on less competitive links but I made good money last month with one page that was beating them. WAS beating them. How do you use SEOmoz? How do you justify the cost, that is offset the expense. If its not making me money i don't see the value. I can get a lot of this information for free but it sure is easier to get it here. Which saves me time. And the other tool i use isn't that good and not always reliable and slow. I've got a week left on my free trail. I had decided to let it go but now I'm reconsidering. $100 is a lot for me and I need to spend more on SEO outsourcing. I wonder if I wouldn't be better off dropping it for a while and then coming back. This certainly isn't mean to be a critical post at all. I'm looking for reasons to stay and make better use of it. Thanks for the thoughts, Rusty
Moz Pro | | RustyF0