Get your own domain name - Many sites offer to host your content on their site.  This makes you dependent on them.  This may be all right now but three years from now you may regret this.  Domain name registration cost around $10/year (this fee gives you the legal rights to use the domain and no one else provided you renew it every year).  Pay it and start developing your own site which you control.  Once you have a domain go and get yourself a hosting package.  Shared hosting is good enough to start with and costs from $5-$10/month.  Read the rest of this entry »

Part I 

First of all I would like to welcome you to SEO Affiliate Marketing.   Secondly I would like to clarify that “aggressive seo” and “affiliate marketing” are two separate things.  As an affiliate you can do aggressive seo and make fast money but it does have its drawbacks like being regularly banned from the engines.  IMHO aggressive seo is getting to be as difficult as rocket science.  If you have it 90% correct, it will not work.  The search engines continue to become more sophisticated.  It is harder to do aggressive seo without triggering a quality filter set up by the search engines.  Read the rest of this entry »

I was talking with a new search engine employee and they were having a hard time understanding affiliates.  The person did not understand why affiliates would ever do aggressive SEO if the search engines hate it so much. 

People also hate direct mail but it is legal and it is profitable.  I don’t understand why affiliate marketing has received a blanket label of being dirty and sleazy.  I have been thanked from countless users for the information they find on my affiliate sites.  I even have several people praying for me because (well I am not going to get into that in this post).  There are some affiliates that are not good for the online community but let’s also say affiliate marketing is not all bad and can be very useful to online consumers. 

Here are some reasons of why I think fellow affiliates do what they do… Read the rest of this entry »

Going through my comment spam folder I noticed a different anchor text being used - SEO.  Oh boy! I start laughing because I know this is going to be funny.  What spammer with half a brain would go after that term? 

I go and visit the page and it has banners for all the big SEO forums and a HUGE H1 text link to mattcutts.com.  I personally know Matt and the people who run the big forums, none of them are spammers (or dumb enough to use comment spam for a legit established site).  Someone is gonna piss off the wrong type of people.  Maybe someone did this as a joke for Matt?  They are linking to his site correctly (including the www).  Would anyone think this would carry link popularity to MattCutts.com?

Now I’m thinking this is either someone trying to give SEO a blackeye or they are hiding their true content until the spiders have found the backlinks from the comment spam.  I don’t see how comment spam is going to give SEO a blackeye, already been there and  done that.  If you are hiding your true content why take the chance of pissing off some big players.  It would have been much smarter to rewrite the wiki page.

Am I missing something?

A problem some people have is identifying quality, relevant sites to partner with.  There are many solutions that you can do to get around this.  One solution is to use the Google Directory.  The Google Directory is DMOZ but it is sorted by PageRank.  Read the rest of this entry »

Many people complain that DMOZ is corrupt and outdated.  Yet they still would love for their site to be listed in it.  If you would like to be listed in DMOZ don’t submit your site, instead apply to become an editor.

If you become an editor you can control the anchor text, site description and can make as many subcategories as you like.  You will have to review a bunch of other sites so it doesn’t look like you are just getting in your site and leaving.

How do you get approved to be an editor?  Find a category that doesn’t have one.  Then fill out the editor application.  Just remember they are looking for people who are unbiased, with a volunteering attitude and passed 8th grade english.  So fill out the application with this in mind.  If you do become an editor just remember to show a little link love to GoodROI your favorite link whore.

SEO By The Sea reported on this research paper (pdf) written by 3 of Microsoft’s researchers discussing their recent examination of similar pages.  They found that about 22% of the pages were identical.  I think this means that 22% of the MSN index and not necessarily Google’s index is identical. 

They also found that identical pages remain identical pages 10 weeks later.  Which makes sense since you would expect a spammer to only touch their auto-generated content once. 

Then it states that these findings could help MSN reduce the load of pages to crawl if they identify identical pages and stop indexing or reduce its priority.  I would agree, but I am not sure MSN has enough research to correctly identify the real site from a fake copy.

The weirdest thing from my pov is that they discuss the implications of this for PageRank.  Last time I checked PageRank was a Google thing and link popularity was the generic name.

Several places are reporting that Eric Schimdt of Google said: “The quickest way to improve the quality of an ad is to have the ad instantaneously turn into a purchase that is 100 percent perfect,”

My speculation otherwise known as my WAG (wild-ass guess) is that Google could start providing a new type of Google Adword.  Let’s call it Google Affiliatewords.  This new ad is really an affiliate banner.  It will appear in the serps like normal adwords and if a user clicks on it they are directly sent to an order page which has Google tracking codes.  Google earns a commission and based on the commission and the CTR they will rank your ads in the serps. 

My WAG idea would address the issue of click fraud since the user needs to use a credit card which would stop the automated bots.  Also it could increase Google’s margin since they would be more involved in the buying process by directly delivering users to the cash register.  It would also reduce the number of multiple affiliate ads in the serps since Google would most likely deal directly with the merchant to get the best rates.   In addition it could force Adsense publishers to improve the quality of their sites.  If a site has poor content a user is less likely to click a buy now ad instead of them currently clicking the google adwords to escape a poor quality site.

The problem is that this would not address the adwords that do not sell things.  There are companies that use adwords to improve their company’s branding or broadcast their message ie politicians seeking election.  Also Google would have to do a better job policing companies since they would be more closely tied to the purchase.  If someone buys items via Google and is unhappy, it could turn into a pr nightmare.

Regardless of my wild ass guess, the marketplace will continue to evolve.  Banner ads used to be big then came text ads.  What will replace the current text ads and will you be able to evolve with it?

If you are concerned about linking to a possibly “bad neighborhood” that has relevant and helpful content for your site users, there are solutions.  You can of course use the nofollow tag (which Captain Sprite is a big fan of).  However there is some evidence that the engines are still following these links. 

What is a paranoid webmaster to do?

Make it too hard for the search engine robots to follow your link.  You can do this by using javascript or redirecting the user through a directory that is blocked with your robots.txt.  Thus placing the link out of the current reach of the engines.  This way you can link to anywhere on the Internet and not have to worry about triggering an penalty for linking to bad places.  That is at least until you get a hand review.  But hey you were only linking to good content that just happened to be in a bad neighborhood. Right?

p.s. be careful that your redirect solution is not exploited by others (in other words keep an eye on your log file for weird referrals hint hint)

Personalized search is here and you shouldn’t be worried.  The search engines have been experimenting with personalizing the search results for each individual users for several years.  Google has been making the most public progress.  If you sign in for GMail or some of there other offerings, they will keep you logged in until you actively sign-out and track your usage and behavior.  Then they will start customizing your search results based on it. 

For example, if you are a plumber and you often search for plumbing supplies on Google, and then you search for seals, you should see mostly sites of seals for hoses and pipes and not sites about the new baby seal at the local zoo listed in the search results. 

Why am I not very worried?  Reason #1 - This technology is still being built and nothing is finalized.  So it is a bit early to be worried.  Reason #2 - In theory this will help drive more relevant users to your site.  If you sell rubber hoses and seals, you do not want kids looking for baby seals on your site.  Reason #3 - If you do get better targeted users with higher conversion rates, it could help you to increase the ad rates on your website. 

Don’t worry be happy.