UPDATE: the post is now half way dowwn the 1st page for the term ‘Benefits of Google Plus’ without any extra link building to that page. I’ve not checked the traffic stats properly, but I have seen an increase in visitors to the website. Also if you would like to follow me on Google Plus then check me out here: gplus.to/GaryYeardley

I recently did a post over on my other blog Webaholic.org.uk about the Benefits of Google Plus. I think its worth a read as I think all Affiliate Marketers and any that runs a Website starts to use it. Also if you need an invite, I’ll happily let you join and be happy for those Affiliate Followers too

Sorry for the short post, its also to get that post on my other blog indexed faster. Bit of an experiment if you like. It’s already sat at no 10 for those title keywords last time I checked.

Enjoy

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With the recent news from Google about a big change to their algorithm and the way the rank websites, how will this affect small niche sites and affiliates? Ultimately Google’s Goal is to provide the most relevant and resourceful websites to answer the search queries. They are penalising sites with little or no unique content and giving kudos to bigger websites that have much more value in unique quality content.  Fair doos. Lets just hope that a small niche site that compares blue widgets from blue widget merchants is not penalised as it does add value to the visitor. I’ts providing them what they searched for and more as saving them time shopping around. Sure these types of sites don’t have a lot of content or a big sites and updated regularly but they can be a good resource. Ultimately Google wants more from these sites but it will be interesting to see how this affects us Affiliates.

I think things like quality and amount of links to the site, the onsite seo and internal site structure and linking will still play a big part in ranking those websites, small or big. I think this change will simply eradicate those sites that are just duping content and throwing up tiny sites with no value.

When building you niche site, always think about the consumer, the visitor your demographic market and what value your site will be adding to them coming to your site. Think of Google wanting your site to be relevant to the search terms, the links to your site be organic and as natural as possible. Don’t go throwing hundreds of links a day just to try and force this. Market your website using social media and if you truly offer something unique then you will do well. IMHO!

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I was reading on the Affiliates4U forum last night about Affiliates getting banned by Google when using Adwords. Google give them too many reasons and they find themselves out of business as they were almost 100% reliant on PPC. Now until recently we have been almost 100% focused on SEO as its the way we learnt how to get traffic to our sites using Keyword domains and linking using correct Anchor keyword links. We’ve recently started looking into PPC on our bigger sites whilst we wait for our sites to climb in SERPS organically as these sites aren’t keyword domains so they are taking a lot longer to rank.

What it highlighted to me is how much we rely on Google. They could change both SEO and PPC tomorrow if they really wanted. I doubt they will change there model too much but they are always changing the benchmarks for SEO, that’s for sure.

It also highlighted to me, how much Google don’t like Affiliates, well maybe not all affiliates but at least the ones that aren’t really adding value to their search engine. Ultimately all Google want is to provide the best results to the visitor in as quick a time as possible. What they don’t want is to provide search results where the visitors have to go through loops to get to the end site which is providing the service/product/resource or whatever it is.

Will Google start to take into account your site bounce rate, or are they already doing this. We have noticed they already take your site speed into account. I think the golden rule is to not put all your eggs in one basket and to think of your website or websites as a business. In doing this you will want to make sure your website is adding value to the consumer even if it is an Affiliate site. An example could be a review site, a price comparison site or even voucher codes sites. They add value right

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Google has just released Google Instant Search. What does this mean? Well you may have already noticed it. When you start typing, instantly you will see results without having to click the Search Button. Lazy yes but Google have to be staying ahead of its game with other search engines. I reckon they just want to have the best of everything and fair play to them. This will basically save visitors to their search engine even more time as you will now be able to see results quicker than before.

Here is Google Instant Search in Action:

Does Google Instant Search affect SEO?

Google has answered this question already on Instant search and specifically says that nothing will change with the actual search results displayed. Now because Google uses auto-complete technology when you start typing it will give suggestions, so Good SEOs may want to adapt to these changes so that they are ranking for other search keywords similar to what their visitors might be searching for.

You may start to see higher impressions as people use Instant Search as you will naturally start appearing in peoples searches. You will be able to see this in Google Webmaster Tools or any other decent website Analytics.

Google has just published an explanation of how impressions will be counted with Google Instant:

• the traditional count method – when your site is displayed in search results after a completed search
• if the user begins to search and then clicks any link on the search results page, including an ad or “related search” suggestion
• if the user stops typing and the search results appear for at least three seconds

For me I don’t think it will change the way I see results, yes they might be a bit faster but ultimately if I want to search for something then I will either type in all the word or words or auto-complete before I see the results I want. Only time will tell though and I’m sure I will find interesting stuff having a play with it. Like for example it doesn’t work with rude or adult content keywords I’m sure many of you will now be typing this into google as we speak! Some novices out there may still need to look at the keyboard when they type. Some people might not even go to Google directly but use a Toolbar of some sort so may not notice this.

How are my PPC ads affected with Google Instance Search?

Google says ads are now being shown for predicted queries, and the ads will change as searchers continue to type.

Google continues to explain that ad impressions will only count in three situations (much like the organic impressions listed above):

• the user clicks anywhere on the page after beginning to type a search query
• the user chooses one of the predicted queries from Google Instant
• the user stops typing and search results are shown for at least three seconds

Be good to hear other Affiliates opinions on this. I’ve already noticed that Kevin Wood from Affiliates4u has put his point of view on Google Instant here

Also see this thread to find more affiliates discussing this

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Not so long ago, Google had announced that website speed would be part of their ranking algorithm. We have recently been affected by this with one of our niche sites. We were in 2nd spot on the first page of Google for some time for our 1 keyword niche domain which gets approx 110,000 exact and 368,000 broad searches in April according to Google Adwords Keyword Tool. I’m not sure if the exact search matters too much when its a single keyword domain! Anyway, we noticed that it had dropped from 2nd spot to nowhere to be seen just the other day so we immediately started looking into what could be wrong to have caused the site to drop. Now this can sometimes be a mission to find out as Google doesn’t exactly tell you whats wrong, you have to dig around. So first thing was to check Google Webmaster Tools to see if there was any errors with our website pages – no errors. Then I checked out the diagnostics section in the speed section, noticed that our sites pages were 100% slower than the majority of websites. Not Great!

This was caused because our site is using our own product database to display the data feeds from several merchants. Now because the site keyword is quite generic there is a massive amount of products to display. This was an older site which was using our old php files which didn’t have pagination so some pages had to wait longer than 1 minute to display all those product images. The solution which we are still working on is to go through all those custom php pages and modify our script to include pagination. This will enable each page to only show say 20 products per page and make the pages load much faster. Something we should have done a while ago.

Now the next challenge will be to convince google to put us back by notifying them that we’ve corrected the problem. Lets see how long it takes to get it back to where it should naturally be.

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Wahoo, This  blog site now has a page rank 3 and 825 page links according to the SEO for Firefox plugin

Considering that we don’t update this blog that often, with both of us having full time jobs, families and our other sites as priorities, its nice to see the page rank climb. We think this is based on a number of factors; a fair amount of unique relevant content, traffic to the site (mostly from A4U), on page SEO and links to our site from varied sources and various different anchor text links.

I’m not sure how accurate this Page Rank checker is and if this is the same as Google Page Rank or not, but its a useful plugin to use when checking out the competition. For us to get to Page Rank 4 I suspect we’ll need a whole load of more good unique relevant content.

We have in the past done some 1 way links from this blog to our niche sites and they have counted towards good link juice from the likes of SEO SpyGlass tool. The main problem with doing this is competition and is it relevant to this blog! oh well if it helps then why not!

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We have setup a couple of quick niches recently. The reason for doing this was we spotted an area where we may be able to rank quickly and also keyword domains were available. Now I know people don’t like giving away their domains but we like to be honest here and therefore would like to make a couple of points we have noticed about them. The sites are for Batman Fancy Dress and Plus Size Swimwear. Now what we have noticed is that these sites have been hard to rank. We looked at the competition and thought we should be able to rank quite easily on Google on the keywords for these domains however after launching them it appears this isn’t the case. So has google changed something or are we seeing that actually thinner sites are going to be even harder to rank for these days.

It also highlights the need to be able to make sites in which you have an interest or can write content about easily as this is one of the key’s to ranking well. We know that content makes for good sites we are just surprised about these sites not ranking when there are sites ranking higher with less content. Oh well keep plugging away. These were just two small domains we knocked out in a day each to see if there was some potential with them. We know niches aren’t the whole way to go and are busy developing a mixture of sites.

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UPDATE: Site back at number 1 as of today 27th Oct 2009, was it something I did?!?!? very strange

Google can be both your best friend and your worst enemy at times. Today it’s the latter. We have a site maternity swimwear which has been ranking at no 1 for well over 2 months now. We had some problems before with the ranking of this site, and what appeared to be a yo-yo effect. We have spent a lot of time trying to make sure the site was developed according to Google’s guidelines.

We haven’t had any recent major changes to the site so this leaves us really confused as what could be causing the issue. The site is being updated on a regular basis for fresh content. My thoughts are its possibly due to either of the following:

1. Back links to our site may have dropped, I did notice a couple of hundred back links from 1 site to our site no longer there
2. Back links from this site (which has now been removed in an attempt to fix the problem) Maybe these links although all one way aren’t relevant. Obviously this will reduce the number of links but will try to focus on more organic relevant links. I know I have added a link back from this post but couldn’t resist as this will be a PR2 link, so even if it helps initially, at least will get us some more sales until we get more relevant back links.
3. Google crawled our site and found 404 pages, possibly due to our Web host (EUKHOST) having problems yet again. We did notice that some of these page URLs had been added to our robots.txt file, thanks for doing this Google.

This is somewhat frustrating when this happens, especially because the site is generating quite a lot of sales. If we were full time and this was happening across several sites, then our earnings could fluctuate and would not be a good business.

Plans for the future going forward is to pick ourselves up and try and establish no 1 position again through more relevant backlinks, maintain updating the content such as offers to the site and also look into dedicated hosting in the near future. Additionally we’ll be looking at developing sites that don’t necessarily rely on SEO such as membership/community sites.

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If you regularly read this blog you will know there are two of us on this project. We write lots and lots of documentation that we need to both access as at the moment we use Google Docs to do this. This is a great tool as we can both access and change documents at the same time, and even msg each other while we are doing so through google docs. What tools do you other affiliates use to store and share your documentation? Would be interested to know if there are better ways of doing this but for now Google Docs is great for our needs as remote affiliates.

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We recently had a problem with one of our sites, Maternity Swimwear. After being at number 1 on google for the main search term the site disappeared. Then after a couple of days it came back again, at number 1. Very confusing. We looked and thought we had discovered some penalties and some problems with the robots.txt file and while the site came back it soon disappeared again. We were stumped. It then got a bit stranger whereby the site would be at number 1 in the morning and gone in the afternoon. We researched this, asked some people on forums and then Gary found the answer. Our site was “yo-yoing”. This is the term used to describe a site that behaves in the way our site was.

So what causes it and how did we resolve it. Well the main cause can be too many internal links on the home page. So Google looks at these as over linking and penalises the site. We resolve this by removing some of these as to be honest, without really realising it we did have a lot of the same links to our categories on the home page.

I then setup a page per merchant. There were three reasons for doing this, one to add internal links to these pages, secondly to add more content and pages to our site and thirdly to actually provide a better resource to the customer so they could view all products from a particular merchant.

We changed the footer information to have more text rather than just internal links.

After a few days our site re-appeared again but this time further down the page on the 1st page of Google, about 7th or 8th. While we weren’t at number 1 our site seemed to settle and stopped yo-yoing. then after about a week our site climbed back to number 1, now on organic content rather than the number of internal links on the home page and has stayed in that position for a good while now. So maternity swimwear is back earning again and to be honest earning quite well. We are on track to meet last months earnings even with the site not being on the 1st page for a few days.

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