October is a busy month for the SEO industry and I’m going to be speaking about link building at both the A4U Expo and the SEOmoz Pro Seminar.
A4U Expo – Day 2 at 4pm – Advanced Link building Strategies for Affiliate Sites
Wednesday October 13th
Achieving strong natural search engine rankings for an affiliate site is a hard task, especially when you consider the advantage that brands have in the current Google algorithm.
This seminar will deliver some actionable tips on building a link-profile that ensures long term sustainable rankings as well as looking at case studies of the natural link building strategies that are being used by super affiliates to dominate the search landscape today.
SEOmoz & Distilled Pro SEO Seminar
Tuesday 26th October
This is a bit top secret but I will be sharing some advanced link building algorithm information. Again it’s day 2 at the end of the day so hopefully people won’t have left or fallen asleep by the time I start talking.
I will also be at the breakfast where delegates can meet all the experts which sounds pretty good, the menu choice was Full English and Champagne so it can’t fail really.
Please note that I won’t be making these presentations public so if you want to see them you have to sign up and come to the events.
For affiliates concerned that their hard work will be wasted by ‘leaky tracking’ of offline conversions, Jonathan Treiber’s offline tracking panel at Affiliate Summit East provided hope for a more accountable tomorrow. (I know, we’re already at Affiliate Summit West – the technology is still new and the tips Jon shared still valuable, so bite me .) Read more →
An interesting case has been reported today with Amazon apparently refusing to honour commissions on affiliate sales generated via Twitter.
It seems they are relying on TOS that say any link has to be from “Your Site” in order to be eligible for commission and Amazon is keen to enforce that. Read more →
This afternoon I’ve been reading through some of the recent filings in the eBay Inc. v. Digital Point Solutions, Inc. et al case whereby the plaintiff eBay Inc. alleged Defendants engaged in cookie stuffing to defraud Plaintiff.
As an affiliate manager, one of your roles is to ensure that your channel gets credit for all the sales that it makes – and that there is no attribution to it of sales generated by other channels.
Today, we’ll think of solutions to attribute credit fairly between email and affiliate marketing programs, when the two overlap. Read more →
As an affiliate manager, one of your roles is to ensure that your channel gets credit for all the sales that it makes – and that there is no attribution to it of sales generated by other channels.
When an affiliate marketing program is the sole marketing channel, this isn’t a problem. But throw in some search marketing, portal buys, banner network campaigns, public relations and an inhouse email newsletter (aka CRM), and life gets complicated! Here’s how to make sure that your marketing channel attribution gives out credit where it’s due! We’ll focus on affiliate related issues in particular.
My perspective is more that of an intermediate-level web analytics user and that of an affiliate; I’ve never been an affiliate manager. But the tips here are mostly about analytics, so I do still feel competent to talk about the subject.
Visitors to Blogstorm over the last few weeks have probably noticed we have taken on a new advertiser, Netpartner. We don’t accept many advertisers here so you can probably guess Netpartner have impressed me with their attitude.
Netpartner is an affiliate network along similar lines to Commission Junction or buy.at with an offering for publishers and merchants alike. They have a variety of offers in the system throughout the world at present.
From their website:
NetPartner provides a vast network for Publishers to find the best offers, from the top domestic and international advertisers, for their (web, email and search listing) advertising space with performance based revenue. Our goal at NetPartner is to provide good traffic performance for our advertisers and at the same time generating high profits for our publishers.
Here is what Ivan Chan, Netpartner General Sales Manager said in a recent press release:
The creation of Netpartner represents years of research and development of our Affiliate Network team. It was developed with the combined ideas, feedbacks of our affiliate marketers and super affiliates, we aim at providing the best and sophisticated traffic exchange experience and convenience to users.
Equipped with enhanced user-friendly interface, Netpartner provides high transparency with the access to accurate tracking and payment checking. Now Netpartner is running a referral award program in which any publisher might be able to win welcome gifts with value equivalent to USD800.
Please visit www.netpartner.com if you are interested in setting up an affiliate program or becoming an affiliate yourself.
Search engines are not quite decided on whether they class affiliate links as paid links or not. If you take the time to set up an affiliate program why not use it to generate thousands of high value links to your product pages?
This post will tell you everything you need to know about maximising the SEO value of your affiliate links.
Easy: Don’t go through a 3rd party
Search engines won’t count your affiliate links if they go via a third party affiliate network. Either go with a network that allows you to use your own links or run the program in house.
Easy: Allow deep links
Most people do this already but it’s important to make sure your affiliates are linking to your product pages not just the homepage.
Harder: Consolidate your links
Most affiliate programs have links like
http://www.site.com/category/product.html?aff=123
This causes duplicate content problems – the way to fix the issue is to set an affiliate cookie and then redirect to the normal product page http://www.site.com/category/product.html
Really clever: Don’t make it look like an affiliate program
Any URL with the parameter aff=123 clearly looks like an affiliate link. Amazon is smart and uses tag= as their parameter. Why not try some of the following as affiliate links?
Confuse Google by using a non-standard nomenclature for your parameters.
Really clever: Intelligent use of cookies
Do you name your affiliate cookies affid? Just because Google doesn’t accept cookies doesn’t mean it doesn’t see what cookies are being sent in the header information.
When Google sees an affid cookie being set followed by a 301 redirect to strip out parameters it’s a fair assumption the link is an affiliate link.
Try calling your cookie something random like “visitor” or even cloaking the cookie so that it isn’t sent to search engines.
Super clever: Don’t use URL parameters
A few sites have started tracking based on referrer headers, this gives a clean link and search engines have no way of knowing the links are affiliate links, unless you are stupidly telling everybody about it.
My favourite trick is to use links in the following format:
http://www.site.com/#john
http://www.site.com/product-name.html#steve
Search engines view urls with different # tags as the same page so you can have as many of these as you like without coming across duplicate content issues. The way to handle tracking is to use JavaScript to parse the # tag and use it to populate a hidden form field which is posted to your shopping cart when the “add to cart” button is pressed.
Most people can’t be bothered to make the connections with local businesses in the same way that Shoemoney did so we need to find a merchant that has a network of shops around the country and are willing to give commissions. Read more →
Building links for household brands is tough, building links for affiliate websites is even tougher. In this guide I’ve asked two of the leading affiliate and SEO experts how they approach link acquisition for affiliate websites. I’ve also added my answers too. Read more →
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I’m sure most of you have read Shoemoneys blog post about 