There are many bloggers who blog anonymously. They take preventive measures like hiding personal info in the domain registry and even use a different IP address for their other sites to stay undercover, but they can still be unmasked by using harmless looking tools such as Google Analytics or Google Adsense.
A free service called eWhois offers a reverse lookup facility of Analytics IDs and AdSense IDs to anyone by just entering a domain name or IP address. So if you find any two websites sharing the same Analytics ID on the service, it is solid evidence that both sites are run by the same person.
Did you ever want to know what sites a blogger owns or who owns an anonymous domain? Then simply head over to eWhois and type in the anonymous domain name of the blogger whose identity you want to determine.
Immediately you will get a list of sites that share the same Google Analytics account. And if it discovers an Adsense ID, you will be shown that as well. Since generally a single Google account is not shared by two users, you can be sure that the same person own all the websites in the list.
Another free service is Statsie. It helps you discover all sites that share the same IP address. This service cannot be considered that accurate, especially if the site is hosted on a shared host. There could be many sites hosted on a server in that case.
If you want to blog anonymously, then here are some tips to protect yourself online:
- Don’t use Google Analytics or any other third-party tracking tools. If you have to, use a separate account with an anonymous email.
- Enable domain privacy on your domain.
- Don’t share IP addresses with any of your existing websites or, better, use a completely different host for your other sites.
- Finally, here’s a good guide with more tips on staying anonymous online.
via Waxy