Affiliate Three » SEO

How will Google v 2 affect affiliates?

James — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 20:27:45 +0000

As many of you may know, Google recently announced Google Caffeine, their new incarnation of their search engine. So what will change? Well, nothing mostly, as Google seems to be following in the footsteps of Apple and the new Google Caffeine promises speed. Most users won’t notice a difference and to be honest, the speed difference is marginal at best. Google also mentions more efficiency, faster crawling and indexing of pages and more accurate results.

However, I suspect for affiliates that Google is beginning to tweak it, which will mean even more problems more thin affiliate sites, as these will lose their rankings faster than you can say “quick buck”. What does it come down to? The age old affiliate mantra – build quality sites with quality unique content and you will probably notice no difference – in fact it may benefit you, as Google will be able to identify those “thin” sites far faster and easier.

At this point in time Google is looking for developer feedback on the differences between the “public Google” and the “Google Caffeine” results.

Whether or not you submit your feedback, it is very intersting to see how your sites will rank when the Google Caffeine infrastructure is moved into the real google.com.

Check it out here

The Michael Jackson effect and affiliates

James — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 10:49:11 +0000

The passing of Michael Jackson was a sad moment in the history of the world and as a as a result of his untimely passing and huge media coverage, there were many reports of the increased traffic on the social networks and sites devoted to the King of Pop. Some reportedly could not cope with these increased traffic levels.

I thought I would use this post to show you just how much an increase in traffic was experienced, from my little corner of the affiliate world. A bit of background first – I set up a small “landing page” style site, with no content except for the main page (and of course the standard pages like a privacy policy and contact details), about 4 months ago. The sites primary aim was to sell Michael Jackson tickets for his upcoming tour of the UK at the 02 arena. I had about 3 auctions listed on the front page with links to tickets on eBay, a popular scalping location for his tickets (some went as high as £500 for a ticket). I had undertaken relatively little promotion on the site except for the some social submissions – it was intended as a PPC experiment. Subsequent to the experiment, I left the site untouched and it received a little attention from Google and the other search engines, with an average of about one visitor a day, with it peaking at about three per day. There were two key events where traffic to spiked – the first being the death of Michael Jackson and the second being the funeral, with the funeral providing a greater influx of visitors. They say a picture is worth a thousand words, so below you can see the Google Analytics graph for a period of a month.

As can be seen above, traffic levels increased by around 2000% around the time of his death and about 4000% around the time of the funeral. Admittedly these are not astounding levels, but the increases are phenomenal.

The lesson learnt? As an affiliate marketer, always be on the lookout for (ethical and moral) opportunities to increase traffic and look for niches (obviously profiting from someone’s death does not fall into this category, but I had not set out to do that).

Suggestions? Ideas? Feedback? Please leave a comment!

Prevent hotlinking using .htaccess

James — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 09:05:46 +0000

I recently discovered the concept of hotlinking, where other websites use images directly from your site without your permission. This has several implications, the worst of which is that Google might give you a slap. It also steals your precious (or not so previous, depending on your hosting plan) and worse uses valuable server resources. So it’s a good idea to prevent this. I chose to prevent hotlinking using my .htaccess file. There are two ways in which you can achieve it, the first is simply to prevent images from being hotlinked (i.e the site which is hotlinking your images simply receives no image) or alternatively you could choose to display an alternative image of your choosing. I chose the first method for my sites, but I’ll cover the second for your information too.

For preventing hotlinking, use the following code:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(.+\.)?mysite\.com/ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteRule .*\.(jpe?g|jpg|gif|png|bmp)$ - [F]

The above code simply prevents anyone from linking to any jpeg,jpg,gif,png and bmp type images on mysitecom (obviously replace mysite.com with your site name). I placed this code right after the PhpBay code required and also removed the “RewriteEngine On” line as this is already in place for the PhpBay code, but you’ll need it if it isn’t already there.

The second method is to replace the image that the stealing site see, using this code:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(.+\.)?mysite\.com/ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteRule .*\.(jpe?g|gif|bmp|png)$ http://mysite.files.wordpress.com/2007/09/no_hot_link.jpe [L]

The above code simply shows a no hot linking image of your choosing instead of the image requested. I create a blog on wordpress.com and uploaded an image to it and linked to this image instead of hosting the image on my site, as this defeats the point of preventing hotlinking.

There are other methods to prevent hotlinking (such as using php or Apache mod_rewrite) but I believe that this is one of the simplest methods of doing it.

Suggestions? Ideas? Feedback? Please leave a comment!

Google slaps or why you should diversify

James — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 20:21:42 +0000

Most EBay Partner Network users rely primarily on organic traffic (search engine traffic) through the use of search engine optimization (SEO). Organic traffic is arguably the best type of traffic as it’s free (as in you don’t pay-per-click, but you do pay in time) and users arriving at your site through search engines are often looking for something specific. The drawbacks of organic search is that it generally require patience and time to rank well. As the large majority of users never get past Google’s second page of results, ranking in page one or two for your chosen keywords is highly prized.

One of my niches was doing very well, ranking two or three for my chosen keywords. This has been the way for several months until recently when I noticed a massive drop in traffic. My instinct told me to head to Google and search for my main keyword search – which I don’t even rank for anymore (well at least in the first 22 pages anyway).

So what do you do if (when?) this happens. My frist instinct was to change everything to try and rank again. However, the wisdom of the Internet says you shouldn’t do this. Any many cases, the best thing to do is wait. While this may seem counterintuitive, it’s best to make no major changes to your site for around a month. You should however, continue to add quality content and backlinks as you would normally do.

Over these weeks, take some time to do some SEO research as well as browse forums and other information sources to see what other people are experiencing. Remember, don’t make any major changes, simply use this time as a learning experience. However, SEO tweaks, site redesign and other minor tweaks can be employed to improve your site. If you’re unsure of the affect on your site, rather leave it. Try to document the changes you make, as you may need to reverse these at a later stage.

The next step is to diversify – find other niches, obtain other sources of traffic (PPC for example). Build other sites in other niches, optimise and build more.

If your site hasn’t returned to similar or close to the traffic levels before the Google slap, it may be time to optimise the site layout or recreate the site from scratch with new content or possibly a new domain.

Handy tip: use the search term site:www.yoursitename.com in Google – no results means you’ve been de-indexed (or if your site is relatively new, say less than a month old, has not been indexed by Google yet) and you may need to move your site to a new domain or start from scratch. Results returned means your site is still indexed by Google, which means you have a chance of ranking well again. Another handy tip – the site:www.yoursitename.com command shows the number of pages in the Google index. Try site:www.yoursitename.com -inallurl:www.yoursitename.com and compare this to the earlier result. The second command shows the number of pages in the Google main index and supplemental index, the second the number of pages in the Google main index. Your objective is to have as many pages in the main Google index, as pages in the supplemental index are not included in Google search results.

Suggestions? Ideas? Feedback? Please leave a comment!

Attracting visitors to your website

James — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 21:20:29 +0000

A considerable amount of Internet marketers spend large proportion of their time building their sites, but very little time attracting visitors. Two general strategies exist for driving traffic to your site, organic traffic (through Search Engine Optimisation or SEO) and pay-per-click. For starters, we’ll focus on driving traffic to your site through several stategies.

1. Write quality content

The number one rule for building traffic and visitors is by writing quality, unique content related to your niche. The search engines, including Google, love unique content and will reward you with top rankings. Along with the unique content make sure you optimize associated article titles, meta descriptions, H1 HTML tags and keywords. Many people however don’t have the time to write articles – in this case there are many people that offer article or content writing services -I would recommend starting with the Digital Point forums, specifically this forum. A word of warning though, there are many “fly-by-nights” so do your research and ensure the user has a good iTrader rating. Duplicate or non-unique content is disliked by the search engines and could decrease your PR or even worse the search engines (particularly Google) could de-index or sandbox your site, meaning that search engines effectively don’t even know your sites exist. Copyscape provides a limited, free service which enables you to ascertain the “uniqueness” of your content.

2. Build links

Arguably right up there with your unique content is your “link juice”. Google’s ranking algorithm, the set of rules which determine your position within search results, factors in the amount of links pointing to your site. Furthermore, Google’s algorithm factors in the quality of those sites that are linking to you. The PageRank (PR) ranging from a zero to a ten, determines how “important” Google thinks your site is, zero being not very important and 10 being the most important. For people with more money than time, there are people that offer link building services. Most offer social bookmarking links and directory submission services. In addition, one of the more expensive options is buying high PR links from blogs or site. In terms of value for money, the social bookmarking services is generally the best option to go with first, following by the directory submissions. Generally, the higher PR links are not worth it for starters, but may be considered further down the road.

3. Give it time and maintain the link and article building

Organic or natural traffic takes time, anywhere between a month to three months to gain some decent traffic. During this time it’s wise to continue to build links and write quality content. With regards to both content and link building, try to build then “naturally” – in other words, don’t build hundreds of links or create a mammoth amount of content at one time – search engines of frown upon this and your ranking may suffer. As your PR increases, so will your rankings and therefore traffic.

Suggestions? Ideas? Feedback? Please leave a comment!