Archive for July, 2007

The Best link-bait ever!

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Hello everyone, I’m sorry that nowadays I don’t write that often but I’m kind’a busy lately with my work and I don’t have the proper time to write articles and research what’s happening around, so this time I’ll post one very interesting SEO tactic for quick accumulation of high quality backlinks.

Affiliate Marketing as SEO?

Yep, everybody knows that affiliate marketing is extremely useful in terms of sales, but even better for SEO. The whole thing is that people are so greedy about money that they will post your affiliate link on every page and even if they don’t get any sales the link will still be there. Now the trick is to craft your Affiliate marketing scripts very carefully so that you will be able to control what’s being listed on that url and therefore benefit the most from it.

I’ve always love Amazon dot com for their innovative strategy (that’s back in the 90s) when they opened their first affiliate program. They were very smart and created keyword rich text links with images loading from their own website for affiliate program that created numerous deep backlinks. This increased their rankings and nowadays they rule the books niche (actually few others also), and this is mainly due to this extremely smart affiliate link bait strategy.

I remember that few years ago I was so greedy that I put amazon affiliate ads on few of my websites. This multi-linking per page is really awesome deal for the linked website! so much link juice … I guess that explains why Amazon dot com now has 184 million backlink popularity! Also the big thing about REL - Nofollow is not really common practice and the redirects are a big headache so only very small percentage will bother doing it.

One of the interesting things that I found with Google was that they do accept affiliate links and they count fairly large percentage of them. The main reason is because they are highly relevant to the linked page, they are located in top visible areas and that makes them pass very nice PR juice, and people do click on them!

What I’m suggesting? If you have a website that offers some services, start affiliate programs! Even if you don’t make much profit due to revenue share, its still good because you’ll get on top of the organic listings fairly quickly. Simple as that!

Also be aware of what type of linking structure you do because that’s extremely important. The best way to make affiliate network is to use browser referred url as the affiliate id and use the clean html url as the link. This will bring you the maximum benefit! If you think that you “affiliates” won’t agree to that then you can use the /file.html?affiliateid=123 style but never more than 1 parameter!!

If you need help in building your affiliate program just send us an email and we’ll work out something for you.

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Aviva Directory offers 15 days promo coupon $20 off regular listings

I just received the Aviva Directory newsletter where they are offering special promotion $20 dollars off from July 15 to July 31 if you use special coupon code “Umdum“. This makes regular listings to be $29.95 with the coupon which is a really nice deal!

For the people that don’t know much about Aviva Directory, I’d like to say that this is one of the best directories on the Internet, based on quality and page rank. Based on simple SEO estimations, a listing in Aviva Directory can bring you so much pr and link juice than about 200 regular directories and counting. The is mainly due to the large number of backlinks those guys invested in and the strong pagerank on numerous inner pages that can be easily passed on your listings.

I don’t want to advertise them too much, but I’m really happy with them and I can most definitely say that they are one of the 10 directories I have paid listings. Also here I can put some criticism on the Yahoo directory which is the most pricey directory I’ve ever enlisted in with its $250 annual listings and the fact that I didn’t get even one hit from that directory for the 6 months I have listing with them. I guess the large number of links and my deep page listing is making it the most unprofitable investment I ever had and they only thing I can say in my defence why I have a listing there is only prestige. (but in reality who cares about prestige when its all about visitors and link juice).

Also I’d like to say that Aviva is one of the few directories that I know that receives huge amounts of actual visitors. This makes aviva very interesting and cost effective way to get both good pr and few visitors for the price of $30.

I just wanted to share this and help you enjoy this great benefit since I’m on my way to list my huge array of niche websites.

To get your listings click on the banner on the right or click here

Cheers,

Venetsian.

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Stumbleupon can get your AdSense Account Banned for Invalid Impressions Fraud

I know this sounds very hard to believe but it is a real fact and many webmasters that practice Stumbling had felt it. The wost thing about that is that most of them didn’t really realized what they were doing wrong as their visitors did not do any click frauds, and therefore there was no reason for their account to be banned. In reality Click Frauds are one of the many CPC frauds on the Internet.

The similarity in all banned from AdSense webmasters was that they all used massive stumbling as primary traffic source. Also and Google sent them email stating that they ban/terminate their accounts for invalid ad impressions, but didn’t explain what exactly that meant bu that, and actually I didn’t know also until I found one book on per-per-click marketing book where the I stumbled across the term invalid impressions fraud

A large number of impressions, without the accompanying click on your ad - if you notice that there are a lot of impressions (views) of your advertising, this could indicate impression fraud. Impression fraud is artificial inflation of your ad impressions that may cause your ad click-through rates to drop below the Google minimum and your ad will be disabled. Until you realize this, your competitors have free reign to use your keywords, sometimes at bargain prices. As well, your relevancy ratings for search engines may drop as they record numerous impressions, but no interest shown via visits to your website, which could lead to a shutdown of your campaign.

source: Pay-Per-Click Search Engine Marketing Handbook

Most of the AdSense Publishers know that Stumblers generally don’t click on ads and this somehow generates very low CTR. Depending on the ads generated to your particular page and the number of AD units, you might get stuck in a situation where your CTR goes below the required minimum and therefore you’re unintentionally making impression fraud. In order to protect their publishers (actually to keep their ads active so that they continue to pay) AdSense might send you the “you’re banned” email that can get you in really bad situation.

If you do get this email, I strongly suggest that you contact AdSense and tell them that you will lower the number of your ad units and ask them to give you some test period where you can increase your CTR above the minimum. Actually most publisher are afraid to get banned for high CTR, but in this case having low CTR is also a big problem.

Also I strongly suggest that if you have very low CTR (lower than 1%) you should try to change/optimize your pages in order to show highly relative AdSense ads or lower the ad units so that you CTR can go higher. This is common need for more clicks, but still some type of content don’t really generate too many clickers and in this case we must artificially keep the CTR higher due to this impressions fraud problem.

Please note that I don’t really have that much experience with impressions frauds since all my websites have average CTR between 5%-30% and I never got below the 1% mark. If you know more on that topic, please consider sharing it with us and helping fellow webmasters.

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Search Engine Penalization is Real

I just stumbled on one very interesting article in the Forbes Magazine titled The Saboteurs Of Search which I find quite interesting because it somehow answers some serious SEO questions about spam and possible penalization for your or competitor website.

Matt Cutts, a senior software engineer for Google, says that piling links onto a competitor’s site to reduce its search rank isn’t impossible, but it’s extremely difficult. “We try to be mindful of when a technique can be abused and make our algorithm robust against it,” he says. “I won’t go out on a limb and say it’s impossible. But Google bowling is much more inviting as an idea than it is in practice.”

Cutts also points out that any potential for sabotage exists across all search engines. “It really should be called ’search engine bowling,’ ” he says.

I’m not sure what this will lead, but most definitely will make some people try cyber terrorism and buy some bad neighbourhood links for their competition and see what happens. I already stumbled across few threads on DP where people were looking for adult related links and similar to point to their competitors.

Now Matt doesn’t really say what will be the punishment and how harsh it will be especially after the fact that they know this technique can be used on competitors and is a way of cyber terrorism, but we can most definitely observe and listen to what’s happening around us and if there is a way to penalize I bet that eventually we will hear someone screaming that lost ranking for no particular reason or got his competitor out.

In reality black hat seo offers few very interesting techniques that can be easily done to manipulate and punish small to medium sized websites. The easiest way is the direct duplicate content penalty where the website that has highest pagerank is assumed to be the origin of the content and basically if you have higher pr website you can just copy the content of your targeted website or at least the main pages that are their landing pages, and sit back and watch their rankings drop. The problem with that trick is that you will be clearly identified as the attacker, but if you got your tracks covered with privacy and pay pal payments there is no problem. (I’m not giving you ideas).

Search Engine Link Spam is clearly the second case, and everyone know that if they participate in link farming projects they can get penalized.

I’ll bring updates as they come.

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