Don't Just Affiliate - Add Value

Too many people think that it's easy to set up a website using an affiliate feed, get it listed on the search engines and sit back and wait for the cash to roll in.

I even had people come to me and ask me to build the sites for them. They look blankly back at me when I ask them how they will promote the website, expecting me to produce a website for £300 that will do all of this for them.

Well, if I could spend a couple of days to produce a website that would earn thousands of pounds per year, would I be charging a few hundred for it? Or would I be producing those websites for myself...

What I try to offer is the opportunity for them to add something themselves to the website. Product reviews is usually a good one and let them choose which products they try to sell and add just these to the website.

If you are a travel affiliate then instead of just listing the same old huge list hotels or villas, make sure that you are including resort guides researched and written by yourself just for the site. Maybe even start a travel blog and include the accommodation details in that rather than just listing the 10,000 hotels available.

Whatever you are trying to sell, make sure that you add something to the information available. This means that there is less risk of falling to the search engines duplicate content filters and more chance of visitors stumbling across your new website. Just remember that if you are expecting to make a couple of thousand per year from the affiliate scheme then you are probably going to need to invest the appropriate amount of time to that site.

Feel free to post ideas in the comments!

Google Duplicate Content Filter

I made an interesting observation yesterday about the Google Duplicate Content Filter with a set of new sites. It's a long story - hold in there!

A new customer came to me to develop his suite of sites. He already had the URLs and had published the corporate site (GFS) and all of the other sites had holding pages. He wanted some layout and text changes to GFS so we got them in first and published them. But he wasn't happy with the suite of holding pages. These showed the sites would be ready months ago and were linked to from the GFS site and mentioned in literature. Rather than give a poor impression, the corporate site was copied to all of the other URLs.

So we've got several versions of the same site on different URLs. All of the URLs had already been cached and had Google Page Rank 0. So what would happen?

Step forward a few weeks to Monday and I published the first of the ecommerce sites (MPL Direct). Fine, that's now not duplicated.

For some strange reason, one that I can't remember, I was looking at the search results of the sites late yesterday. And I noticed that only 1 version of the corporate site is now published, even though there are loads about. Quite interestingly, it's the copy on the MPL Direct site. So even though a lot of the text didn't change or changed only a little on the GFS site, that site has been removed as duplicated in favour of the site that's only just had the content published. None of the other sites are cached.

The other twist in the tail is that by luck, it's the first site that we've gone live with. So as soon as Google visits that site, it will now no longer count that sie as duplicate to the rest of the suite. Will that mean that one of the others suddenly takes the role of lead site according to Google?

No idea why this one was chosen as the favourite. GFS had the text, or nearly the same text, for months before. GFS was registered long before MPL, which was registered in a batch of sites. Both have PR0, but GFS has 6 pages PR0, MPL Direct just the 1 page.

The strange think is, another URL is appearing as favourite today - one that I haven't yet been given control of, but one with a copy of the original GFS site.

Something to watch for anyway.But the moral of the story is that if you think buying multiple URLs to increase your traffic, make sure they do all have unique content.

Automated Link Exchange Sites

Which automated link exchange sites do you use? For some of my sites, and many of my customers' sites, I use LinkMachine.

For example, CompareMortgageRates and FinanceHunt both use it to good effect.

What I like about it is it is easy to install and use afterwards. I installed it onto a new customer's site yesterday and timed the process. Including setting up a new email address (so he can keep his link exchange emails separate from his business emails), installing and setting up link machine and linking to the new pages from the existing pages, I had the entire process completed in 15 minutes.

He now just needs to check who is requesting link exchanges each month and check they are still linking back. If he upgrade to the full paid version then a lot of this is done automatically.

Best of all, the basic version if free - so he now has his link building automated and it's not cost us any cash.

If you are looking at installing an automated link exchange onto your website, then LinkMachine might be a good place for you to start.

Description Tags

Do you use automated link building software on your sites - such as Link Machine?

I've successfully used this for a while now for my own and customers' sites and am very pleased with it. But I've noticed that sometimes the directories get good PRs - in the best case every page PR4 - whilst sometimes the pages aren't ranked at all.

I've also noticed a change of page rank in my own webdesign site. For years now, all of the main pages have been PR4. But in the last update many internal pages dropped to PR3, with 2 dropping PR altogether. I expect that the 2 that dropped totally have at least in part cause the others to loose PR.

What have these in common? Well I was going through my own site making some changes when I noticed that the two pages in question accidentally shared meta descriptions. Neither page has been SEOd - price lists etc, so I've never noticed before.

Then I remembered that the links directory pages all take one template page for each site. So within each links directory, all of the meta descriptions must be the same. So I started to look.

And then I discovered that my links directories in which all pages have a PR have the description meta tag missing. The others either are on a low PR site or all of the pages have the same meta description.

You can imagine how quickly that meta tag was removed from my site CompareMortgageRates.co.uk. It will take a while to see anything - especially as the site has currently lost PR. But it's an interesting theory.

What's The Best Anchor Text

Yesterday, I mentioned that I was reviewing the links in to a site that was getting top position on google. My interest in the site is that it is a direct competitor to one of my customers. I won't mention either site, for fear of upsetting the SEO team that did all of the hard work on the competitor!

When you see a site top of Google for many popular search terms, especially differing terms that don't bring up the home page, you would probably expect to see a site with hundreds of links in. But this site only had 19 links in, showing that it's not the site with the most links in that wins, but the site with the Best Anchor Text.

That's where I left off yesterday - what's the best anchor text? So I looked at the site's 19 links - and 11 of them were from the site itself, with 9 as supplemental results!

So what was so special about this site's links that it was able to beat 489,000 pages of results to take top spot in Google? Were all pages linking in with super rich anchor links?

Actually no. Some listed loads of brands, one or two the main keyword and the rest were the site name, with other bits added. Overall, it appears that Google considers the best anchor text> to be not the ideal keywords, but random words. After all, this must be more 'natural'.

The alternative answer is - was is the sites themselves that gave extra weighting. I'll look at that tomorrow...

What Anchor Text Is Best

Yesterday I looked at What Links Are Best - today, What Anchor Text Is Best?

The two go hand in hand. Pick a good link and good anchor text and you have a match made in heaven. A link that's sure to earn you grace and favour and move you up the search engine rankings. If it's a really good link, it will appear on Google when you check for back links, and looking at some really popular sites and some don't have that many links showing.

But others have huge numbers of back links showing, and don't necessarily perform well. It's not all about quantity - it's about quantity. So what should the anchor text include?

Traditionally it's been stuffed with the target keywords. But I think that if Google hasn't already started to ignore them, then it soon will do. I was with a customer yesterday and looking at his competitor's site, which recently dropped out of favour. The top site for a search term he's competing on has 19 links in, his site had 300+ links in. Yet it's the 19 links site that does best.

His competitor won't / can't divulge his link building strategy. He leaves it to an SEO company and they won't say what they are doing so that others can't copy. Sounds a get out to me. But why has the site with 19 links in listed so highly?

Simple, it has got better anchor text. I also happened to notice they have exchanged links with one of my (unrelated) sites. So I've started looking through their links to see how they link back - and I was very (pleasantly) surprised. More tomorrow when I've checked the rest of the links.

What Are The Best Type Of Links?

If you ran a finance website and I approached you offering you a link out of my PR4 mortgages website (no strings, just a free link) then what sort of link would you want? A couple of keywords? You site name? 'Click Here'?

Nearly everyone would go for the the first option, the rest opting instead for their site name. But is that the correct answer? If you are arranging links, then the answer should be whatever is the best type of link.

What is the best link? We only need to look at a few well known websites that have made Google Page Rank 10 or 9 and then think about their linking structure. These have got tons of links in with the anchor text 'click here'. It's sheer volume of links that Google recognises that has worked for them, not keyword stuffed links. OK, these sites now do well for 'click here', but it's not really a main keyword.

Let's look at this the other way around. If the link is using high performing keywords, is it most likely that the link is a "natural link", a result of a links swap or someone optimising their site using internal linking. On the whole, I'd say links swap, optimisation then natural links (including internal non-optimised links).

So what does a keyword stuffed link tell us. Probably that there's a good chance that link has been created to fool search engines. If Google's long term aim is to detect and ignore these SEO links, then what's it going to go? Probably, if not already, it will start to ignore popular keywords in links and gradually include more keywords in that list until it gets the right results.

So just what are the best type of links? Natural links of course - I decide to link to you because I want to. And when that happens I include in the link's anchor text something relevant to that page, not necessarily to your site.

Playing With Links

Overnight a lot more pages have appeared in the Google listings for two of the blogs in the target="_blank". Interesting to note that the site 2 is quicker at getting from cached to listed than site 3, but has less pages listed. I expect that over the week it will catch up, and maybe overtake. Site 1 remains at only the home page.

But this is showing how important links are to search engines. Over on the other experiment, with anchor text, although it is a lot newer and I'll be reporting on only the 2nd week tomorrow, the expected results are starting to show through. This contradicts what people are currently saying, but does agree with my theory about the most recent Google changes.

This is quite fascinating to me. It could mean that Google is working towards the death of the links directory, which would not be a surprise. The sites that list well will be those with a lot of natural links in, not those that SEO 'experts' have spammed lots of link directories for (and I won't miss those emails...). That's heading towards what Google would probably like to see, but it could also spell the end of the internet entrepreneur creating his own small site and getting to the top of the rankings. Only the big companies with massive exposure will get the natural links in still.

I suppose it reflects what is happening on the high street. The big players get all of the customers, the small players are being pushed away. It will be a shame if the internet becomes dominated by just the big sites.

Why Am I So Interested In Anchor Text???

What is my interest in Keywords in Anchor Text?

Well, for a start as a web designer I want the best for my customers. I also run a few sites for myself and have noticed strange effects – mainly around site that have used keywords in the anchor text. As you will see from the list of links on the right, they were probably fairly validly used.

But I noticed that the page rank didn't filter down as well to these pages and the same happened on some customer sites, but not on others. The only common theme was how popular the anchor text would be in search engines.

Now in the past we have been told that anchor text is a great way of increasing a site's optimisation for a particular key word. And people used this to great effect with Google bombing, so something had to be done.

It wouldn't be beyond reason to expect Google to now say there's a threshold. Only X% of link's anchor texts should contain keywords. In the case of my secured loans pages, that's pretty harsh, so sense would dictate that maybe that's not what would happen. Or maybe it's something under development.

Whatever it was, my mortgages site fell from number 1 spot on it's preferred keyword to hovering between pages 5 and 7 on Google. And I'm still looking for the reason and trying to get it back up there!

Still Not Convinced???

Am I still unable to convince you that using keywords as anchor text could be harming your links?

I maintain 2 very similar golf sites for customers. Very similar indeed. Both take a product feed from the same merchant and use it to create a list of brands that merchant sells and a list of product categories for that merchant, linking to the individual items.

Both sites are and have been for a while page rank 3. Both list all products & categories on the home page and the structure of the 2 sites is very similar. What, apart from the style, is different about the sites?

Basically, the second site uses truncated descriptions and includes the item name & price of the item in the anchor text (as opposed to just the item name). Also, the first site appends the word 'Golf' after every brand name. Given that the product list is probably a lot of keywords (Golf Clubs, Golf Bags etc) and we now have 'adidas golf', 'nike golf' etc, most of the anchor texts in the first site could be said to be keyword related.

Guess which site has recently been getting the most commissions from search engine visitors – the second site, the one with the less important keywords in the search terms.

Google Following Image Links

I mentioned a few days ago that a new site had been fully spidered quite quickly even though all links were anchored with images.

I also mentioned this in yesterday's post and said 'with no apparent search engine benefit'.

Well from what I have just been reading, it seems that maybe I'm wrong. There's a theory about that I've only just heard of (maybe I'm way behind the times here) about image alt texts.

It says that on the whole, Google now ignores alt text for images. The once powerful and almost guaranteed method for good search engine placement is now totally ignored (demonstrating evolution of search engines – why could they now now ignore anchor texts???). It's not quite that simple, but that's basically it.

With apparently one exception. If the image is being used as an anchor for a link then the alt text is read and used. It could even be that the link is only followed if there is some alt text in the link – it's being used the same way as anchor text used to be there.

Just wanted to clarify a couple of points and record what I've been reading!

Could Google Punish Some Links?

Would it be fair of Google to penalise links that make heavy use of keywords in the anchor text, as I suggested that it might be yesterday?

Outright no. I have a page about "Secured Loans" on my CompareMortgageRates.co.uk web site (yes, notice site name for safety!). Given secured loans is a keywords would I then be expected to change the anchor text to something strange (links as shown on the right)?

Overall, probably yes. It's a technique employed in links directories (which Google frowns upon), links sellers, spammers etc. It probably would catch more people that Google target than it would hit who should escape.

So it is something they could have tried. Just a pity that my mortgage site talks so much about secured loans, unsecured loans, mortgage calculators and other keyword specific anchor texts.

As I mentioned when I discussed Starz graphic links are being followed – and in this case followed well. Yes with no apparent SEO benefit because there isn't the chance to stuff the link full of keywords. In this site's case, every graphic link has been followed and all pages on the site are of equal page rank.

Google does evolve. Maybe this is part of the next evolution. Maybe they've tried to knock out the target sites and are now watching the drama unfold and seeing which other sites have been unfairly hit so that they can further refine the criteria and get closer to "perfection". After all, why else would Google make publicly available it's page rank? That must cost Google a lot of time, effort and cash. What do they get from it?

Google Punished Paid Advertising?

It's been talked about that the October Google update hit sites selling links. But how?

Well there is a page on Google to report such sites. But could Google have really checked every one of these reported sites and included it in a bad list? Highly unlikely. This would be a lot of processing of exceptions, which I'm sure Google would prefer to avoid.

Instead they have probably done what they have done in the past when they found spam sites etc. They've studied the pages and decided what these guys are always doing that other pages don't always do. More to the point – what patterns do the links show that natural links don't show?

Well paid advertising links, especially in blogs, will be written into an advertorial. There will be an agreed number of links from the post to the advertiser. All of the links will be live – no redirects, no 'rel="nofollow"' tags etc. And if these links are for best SEO, then the link text will frequently include keywords.

Notice that last one, we're back to keywords in anchor text. Now, if what I talked about last week about my theory that Google ignores keywords in anchor text, then maybe I'm starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

Also badly hit were massive link directories. Google is known to punish link farms. And don't most link directories also use keywords in the anchor text?

If this is what is happening is this fair? I'll take a look at that later in the week.

October Google Page Rank Update

A lot is being talked about the latest (October 2007) Google Update. Basically it appears that directories and sites selling links for Page Rank purposes have been penalised.

A lot of people are complaining that it's a major hit on their sites and I've heard of PR6 sites becoming PR3 – and I thought a drop or 1 was bad! It would appear that Google has targeted these sites selling links because links = "popularity" = increase page rank.

But some observers have pointed to sites that have been included that don't sell links and some that do sell links that haven't been included. On close investigation, some of those not selling have been found to use other popularity practices that are frowned upon.

So what could be happening? Well yes, fair enough if Google increases sites' Page Ranks by counting links in and people try to cheat this system them they are in their right to change their own internal ranking system. I agree with that – a lot of people don't. But how has Google identified sites selling links and hit so many so well? I'll take a look later this week!

Week 5 Results

After the end of Week 4 I have stopped monitoring the results daily. It was becoming just too obsessive!

Now rather than looking at pages cached, I'm trying to watch frequency of caching. It is known that popular sites are cached daily, unpopular sites less often and in my experience this can go to monthly or worse...

So site 1 - with no links - no displays 4 pages cached. Internal pages were last cached 14th October (2 articles & 1 archive) and the home page almost a week later on the 20th, sometime after that day's post. The most recent 2 posts haven't yet been picked up.

Site 2 - normal links - has 8 pages, all cached from the 2nd to 4th November. The home page is there, but the most recent post is missing. 7 of 9 posts cached.

Site 3 - target="_blank" links - home page cached on the 9th with 5 out of 9 posts cached on 31st October, 2nd November, 4th November (2 posts) and 9th November. Plus the October archive on 10th November.

It will be interesting to see in a couple of days whether site 2 has been fully cached again this weekend. It is getting a lot more consistency in its caching.

Improving Page Rank With Links

So is Google Ignoring Links With Keywords? I think it could be. It's certainly a way for it to get out a monster it (and other search engines) have created.

A while back there was keyword bombing where people teamed up and used inappropriate anchor texts on links to popular websites for a bit of fun. Google acted against these links individually. But if they realise there is abuse of the system, why not ban it all together?

It's an obvious move. People outside of Google work out how to falsely optimise sites, so Google changes the algorithm. It has happened before – alt text used to be a guaranteed way to the top, as did the title text.

It is known that many directory sites have suffered a drop in page rank – namely those selling one way links. One way links are known to really improve page rank and Google could have stopped this industry by reducing the page rank of the directory sites abusing their page rank. Including keywords in the anchor text was another way of optimising pages / sites and is often used in directories. If you are paying to improve your page rank then you want the best – so you get your keyword / phrases in the anchor text.

So why should Google not be able to work out that stuffing anchor texts full of keywords is (a) typical of directories and (b) a sign of cheating? Reduce the power of links using keyword phrases for anchor texts and drop the page rank of sites that do that a lot and you penalise the directories from 2 sides at once.

You also penalise innocent sites. Those that maybe are legitimately using these keyword phrases – possibly accidentally.

Maybe the percentage of such links should be taken into account. Maybe one day it will. But if you are link building to improve your page rank, don't put all of your eggs in one basket. Have at least some of the links using your site name or description – not just your favourite keywords.

Starz Ceilings on DIY SOS

I was reviewing a site that went live a few weeks before the last Page Rank update - Starz Ceilings. He's already 'Starred' on these pages (sorry – couldn't resist!).

The guy's products are about to be featured on the TV this weekend – something like Starz Ceilings on DIY SOS. So we're just giving the site a once over. I noticed that the home page had gone in at Page Rank 1, not bad given the site was only 4 weeks old at the time of the latest Page Rank export. What was interesting to note was that the rest of the site was also Page Rank 1. Usually for a new site I expect the internal pages to be 1 ranking lower than the home page, increasing only as the home page rank increases.

If that was not puzzling enough, then the fact that every link uses graphics makes it even more puzzling. Traditional theorists have always said that links using images don't allow search engines to spider the site. The theory is that search engines derive no information about the pages through the link and don't follow them.

But if these pages are all cached and all equal page ranked, then Google is visiting the pages and liking the links. The fact that Google can derive nothing from the anchor text isn't hindering the work – if anything the result is better.

I only noticed this after yesterday's post. But it does make me wonder more is Google Ignoring Links With Keywords?

Consider for yourself the sites I've shown. Those with graphics instead of text do well, so do those not using keywords in the anchor text. Those using keywords are being dropped…

Google's Page Rank

More about my confusion with Google's Page Rank.

Looking at the links in the paragraphs at the bottom of the mortgage site one paragraph has a lot of popular keyword phrases. These pages are grey barred. The other paragraph doesn't intentionally have a lot of popular keyword phrases, but some probably are well searched on. Those that could be well searched on are grey barred, the rest are Google Page Rank 1.

Seems to be a big coincidence? I looked at a couple of other sites or my own that are also struggling and were once quite good. Both have been Google Page Rank 4 until recently. There's my Mobile Phone Site and the Holiday Cottages Site. Until recently both had good home page Page Ranks, but the 2nd level pages weren't page ranked. Both use (legitimately) keywords / keyword phrases in the anchor links.

So I surmise that maybe rather than it being the length of the paragraph that the link is in maybe Google is starting to ignore links that use strong keywords in the anchor text. Not necessarily always, but probably in coalition with other factors. For example, maybe if one or two links on the page use high density keywords but then there are a few more that don't then you are OK. Looks like my sites are triggering the factors and I'm suffering!

Google Page Rank

I mentioned yesterday about my confusion with Google's Page Rank. I left the post a little open at the end as it was dragging on a bit.

What I noticed through my new Promotional Items website was that all but 1 of the second level of pages was cached with a Google Page Rank 2. The missing one was cached, but grey barred (there are now more pages like this – they have been added recently).

It's been confounding me as to why that one link page didn't have a page rank. The page has existed as long as the rest and there's never been a problem with its links. So what is different about it?

I tried something different when I set up the navigation on this site. I actually reduced the amount of optimisation for 2 reasons. First, it looks better, but also just in case Google thought it too much. So I purposely did not include whole keyword phrases in every anchor text. This worked fine, except for one link in which it still came out as a popular keyword phrase.

You can no doubt guess which link this was!

And guess how I have been optimising the mortgage site – that's right, by using keyword phrases in the anchor text. Of all of the links that appear on every page only 1 isn't a popular keyword phrase (and most are actually the most valid descriptions of the page – I'm not spamming). And that page is the only other Google Page Rank 2 page on the site.

A bit more investigation is needed here!!!

And Still Page Rank Confounds Me!!!

I was looking through my Compare Mortgage Rates site yesterday to see which pages were cached on Google and which had a page rank.

Most of the pages are cached, but with a grey bar. Which is strange - I always thought grey bar meant not cached on Google???

The home page and one other hold a very disappointing PR2 (was 5 a few updates ago). 14 pages are page rank 1, even though these are only linked to from the 2 PR2 pages. There's also a PR0 page that has not been touched or linked to for about 2 years!

The strange thing is that the main pages - those that are linked to from every other page on the website, are all grey barred (but cached). Whether my hosts have had some regular problem around the time of the page rank update that I was not aware of seems an unlikely explanation. More likely is the positioning of the links on the page.

I've realised that the links on every page to the main pages form a nice neat column. But those that Google seems to be following are a paragraph. The one PR2 internal page is not only in the column of links but also included in the text.

I've noticed on other sites using a similar layout that the home page is PR4, but the internal pages are not page ranked.

I'm starting to wonder if Google is trying to detect link exchanges by using some algorithm along the lines of if the link is on a line of it's own delimited by <br> then ignore it.

A lot of link exchanges would be detected this way and it would throw weight into proper links within text. And looking at various sites that link to a well performing site, not one is using the line break. But it means that internal links structures in a vertical format are penalised.

It's also interesting to note that the one links scheme that I notice always does very well allows the link to be placed mid paragraph.

It wouldn't fully explain all of the strange results I'm seeing, and another new site of mine (Promotional Gifts) seems to go against the theory. It has a very similar row of links, it's home page is PR3 and all but one of the 2nd level pages are PR2. Only 1 2nd level page is grey barred. Something else stands out about that link. But that's enough for today...

Your comments and observations are welcome. Please post a comment!