After been involved in web marketing for years now, right from when arranging your website for a better exposure to a search engine was one of those great breakthroughs no one had thought about before, I stumbled upon a new and quite interesting way to promote your website and products.
This latest trend I have spotted, after the one where you do mass-commenting on blogs and include your website’s URL, is to place your URL on other website’s statistics logs.
A year ago I remember having a look through one of my website’s referrals statistics (something I do regularly, as any self-respecting webmaster does) and spotted one interesting referral site that I had not expected and would not believe it would be possible for my link to exist there. It was from a reputable on-line casino website. Now, I thought, perhaps our visitors have our website open at the same time they visit their casino (sometimes this messes up the ‘referral’ header in a browser).
Today, I noticed around 100 different online poker rooms being ‘referrals’ on most of my websites. To be fair, it doesn’t really make any sense these being web marketing strategies because no one, and specially no search-engine, is going to see my site’s stats. Then again, I know there are many sites where the statistics are freely available and that could represent a fair chunk of the personal sites out there. Without a context-aware algorithm, search engines will simply presume these sites are ‘linking’ to the online poker rooms and therefore increase their results on a web search (Google is the easiest target for this kind of strategy). That is a pretty clever, if not outrageous, way to improve your sites ranking.
There is another possibility though which is based on the fact that most web masters will visit any ‘interesting’ looking URL’s on their website’s referral statistics. Now, considering web masters will probably spend most of their time online and probably fit into your average Poker player profile, could this mean this is all about getting *them* to use their poker room? It would make a lot of sense.
I am really curious now so if anyone has any idea about why this is happening (at a frightening pace, may I add) please let me know :) (I should probably be looking into spamming web sites statistics with my web hosting company! That would work, wouldn’t it? :P )
