Affiliate Marketing Plugins

This is from Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO:

We went ahead and did this post on the official Google webmaster blog to make it super official, but I wanted to echo the point here as well: Google does not use the keywords meta tag in our web search. To this day, you still see courts mistakenly believe that meta tags occupy a pivotal role in search rankings. We wanted to debunk that misconception, at least as it regards to Google. Google uses over two hundred signals in our web search rankings, but the keywords meta tag is not currently one of them, and I don’t believe it will be. In addition to the official blog post , we made a video as well: I hope this clarifies that the keywords meta tag is not something that you need to worry about, or at least not in Google.

Read the rest of the post here:
Google doesn’t use the keywords meta tag in web search

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From SEO Greenhouse:

Found this referrer my server logs today: http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=wordle Whoa, could my little website be ranking for “wordle” just a couple days after I mentioned it in a post? Of course not. But the MSN/Live Search bot sends phony HTTP_REFERER strings when it crawls sites. You know, I’ve seen faked referrers in my logs a lot. Here are a few actual examples to demonstrate the fine enterprises Microsoft is apparently emulating: http://www.feelgoodpharma.com/product/c/57 http://www.viagraoverstock.com/ http://www.igsvmortgage.com http://www.blacks-xxx.com/latina_sucks_monster_meat_rod.htm (I know this is old news . The fact that Microsoft is still spamming websites with faked referrers a year later is confounding. One thing is sure — the day I run into bandwidth overcharges for this server, msnbot is going to be given a starring role in my robots.txt file.)

Continue here:
Live Search is a tease

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Here is a good post from Google Operating System:

As anticipated last month , Google’s experiment that lets you reorder and annotate search results is now live. Google SearchWiki should be available automatically if you are logged in to a Google account and it can be recognized by the visual clutter added to the search results. Next to each result, you should see three new options: a way to promote a web page at the top of the results, an option to remove results from the page (they’re still visible at the bottom of the page) and a feature that lets you share public comments about a result. After promoting a result, Google shows some unnecessary information about the other people who promoted the result. It’s important to remember that all the changes are saved to your Google account and they won’t affect the search results for everyone, at least not directly. If you want to see an aggregation of all promotions, demotions and comments, go to the bottom of the page and click on “See all notes for this SearchWiki”. This is the real wiki built by Google and it’s easy to access by adding &swm=2 to the URL of a search results page: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=google&swm=2 . Comments are not very useful, although you could find insights for some obscure queries. The absolute number of people who promoted a search result is not very useful either, especially when you’ll see big numbers like 314,159,265. SearchWiki’s main idea is to give users the opportunity to manually customize the search results and make them more predictable. Since many people repeat common searches like [mail], [weather], [news] and Google’s results are constantly changing, it’s nice to pick your favorite results and display them at the top. If you can’t find a site you like, click on “Add a result” and manually add a page in the list of top results. Good things about SearchWiki : – you can now adjust Google’s results for your typical queries and save time when repeating the searches – use Google instead of bookmarking web pages – for unfamiliar queries, check the wiki to find a different ranking and potentially useful comments. Try to avoid the wiki for queries that are likely to be spammed. Bad things about SearchWiki : – visual clutter. The only way to remove the additional icons displayed next to each search result is to log out. – your changes are available only when you repeat the query and, in some cases, for similar queries (e.g.: [google.com] in addition to [google]). That means you can’t remove a web page or a domain from all search results – comments are public and there’s no option to write private notes (Google removed the option to annotate results in Google Notebook) – an obvious feature would be to get a permalink for your edited results, but Google doesn’t offer this yet – there’s no option to toggle between your edited results and the standard results (you’ll have to log out) – it’s difficult to reorder results, since the only action allowed is to place a web page at the top, after all the other promoted pages. If you promote the page again, it will become the first result. Google has always used people’s clicks to improve the quality of search results, so the new options could influence the ranking algorithms in different ways. “At this time we aren’t using SearchWiki to influence ranking but it is easy to see how that could happen in the future,” said Marissa Mayer . “Search is adapting to the Internet as it becomes a more participatory medium. Now you have people telling us specific things about how they’d like to see their search results. You could imagine if we do see a particular site (about which) people have a unanimous opinion, that might trigger external things. Like maybe we should check out our spam control,” suggested Cedric Dupont , product manager for SearchWiki and Google Knol.

Continue here: Google SearchWiki Launched

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Shared by Chris Dean An interesting discussion, especially after seeing this previously: http://www.coderchris.com/seo/holy-keyword-loaded-sub-domains-batman/2008/08/20 (Example: http://winterjam.hearitfirst.com and http://www.hearitfirst.com/winterjam)? Do you search engines and traffic sites still see them both as traffic to the inherent site hearitfirst.com or is there something I can do to maximize this? Thank you.

Here is the original post:
Does anyone know if there are traffic difference between URLs in the header of a url?

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Following a suggestion at the Enterprise SEO session of PubCon, I’ve been using Wordle.net to create a tag cloud from inbound search terms. Will this actually help me evangelize SEO to the rest of the team? This remains to be seen. Perhaps the real value comes in comparing clouds from multiple data points over time, to visualize the change. Included here is a sample tag cloud, generated for an old personal blog, just to illustrate the result. Read on for tips and a special tool for Omniture users. There are a couple tricks to using Wordle to graph search terms effectively: Replace spaces in multi-term phrases with tilde characters (because Wordle expects space-delimited lists) For enterprise use, divide term frequency by something between 2 and the minimum count represented in your sample, unless you really want to wait while Wordle’s browser-hosted Java applet tries to process your 3MB list of search terms And maybe just strip all the branding terms entirely. (I would hope you’re getting a ton of search traffic for your domain name.) The other trick for enterprise use is getting the search terms in the first place. It isn’t practical to process tens of millions of lines of CLF (webserver log) data frequently. If you have Omniture, try the “Natural Search Keywords Report;” you can request a CSV file of the top 500 items. The CSV data looks like this: 474.,,no on prop 8 petition,1010,0.3% 475.,,acne diet,374,0.1% 476.,,puffy under eyes,215,0.0% 477.,,mac izle,167,0.0% (Note: contrived data.) Converting this CSV data into something you can drop into Wordle is as easy as submitting it to this tool . This is a PHP script I put together to optionally strip branding terms, add tildes, expand term counts, and so on. If you don’t use Omniture, and it is reasonable to process Apache log files directly, you can simply extract the search terms from the log files. This requires a bit of processing too, and I have a tool that as well. But it will have to wait for another day.

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Create tag cloud for inbound search terms via Wordle

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Here is a new post from PHP-Princess.net:

A colleague IMed me earlier today. She was wondering why her .xlsx document was downloading as a strange .zip file. She had uploaded it into the content management system correctly, but when she tried to test it out, the file looked corrupted. Albert did some digging around and figured that the Microsoft Office 2007 files extensions were not recognized by Apache. So downloading files like .xlsx, .docx, .pptx, etc. will translate to file .zip instead. I did some further browser testing and noticed this problem only appears in IE browsers. It works perfectly in Firefox, Chrome, and Safari. To fix this problem, you would need to add the extensions to the Apache config file. Step 1: Make sure you back up your configuration file (httpd.conf in Apache) or (apache2.conf in Apache2) Step 2: Search for the section with the AddType keywords. Step 3: Add the following lines: # MIME type fix AddType application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.spreadsheetml.sheet .xlsx AddType application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.document .docx AddType application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.presentationml.slideshow .pptx If you load other Microsoft Office 2007 files on your Apache web server, you may want to add additional file extensions . Thanks for figuring it out Albert ! That solved the mystery behind two work tickets today. Sources: Albertech.net , MS Office 2007 File Extensions at WebmasterWorld

Continue here: Microsoft Office 2007 Files Downloading as .Zip Files

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This is from LinkedIn Answers: Web Development:

I have a .com website that is hosted in the US and the domain name is registered with a Canadian hosting company. I am trying to determine what the major search engines use as geographic information when attempting to display geographic search results. An individual doing a search in the UK will generally get UK sites first. If the same keyword search is done in the US – US sites will generally be first and the same applies to Canada. The question is if you are hosted in the US but regis …

Continue here:
SEO Geographic Algorithms

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Here is a good post from SEO Greenhouse:

What is the top position in Google worth? Obviously it depends on the search volume for whatever term you’re interested in. Some terms have a lot of search traffic, and others not so much. Whatever traffic you’re getting for a particular term now, I can tell you what you’ll get if it moves up or down in the SERPs. There’s a calculator after the jump… If you’ve been working in SEO for a while, you’ll probably remember when AOL published 20 million not-entirely-anonymous web queries , including the rank of the search result clicked by each user. This led quickly to an analysis of the clickthrough rate for the top 10 positions in the SERPs: Total Searches:9,038,794 Total Clicks: 4,926,623 Click Rank1: 2,075,765 Click Rank2: 586,100 = 3.5x less Click Rank3: 418,643 = 4.9x less Click Rank4: 298,532 = 6.9x less Click Rank5: 242,169 = 8.5x less Click Rank6: 199,541 = 10.4x less Click Rank7: 168,080 = 12.3x less Click Rank8: 148,489 = 14.0x less Click Rank9: 140,356 = 14.8x less Click Rank10: 147,551 = 14.1x less Chances are this chart was simultaneously invented by numerous SEOs, but this particular version was the work of “Breakpoint,” a member of the EarnersForum site (which went offline earlier this year). Breakpoint’s analysis used a sample of roughly half the clickthrough data available in the full AOL data set, and included only the top 10 positions. I’ve reworked the analysis using the full set of AOL data, and extended it to cover the top slots on page two of the SERPs. This makes it easy to calculate the value of any movement, up or down, within the first 12 results. To use the chart, find the row matching the old (or current) rank of your page, then trace your finger to the right, to the column representing the new (or desired) rank. Multiply your current traffic (measured in clickthroughs per day/week/etc) by the number in the resulting cell to find out what your traffic would be, given the SERP rank change you’ve projected. The color is simply a visual hint about whether you’re going to gain or lose traffic. (If the table looks like too much trouble, use the JavaScript SERP Rank Traffic Calculator below.) It’s not always realistic to think you can move your site to #1, at least not in the short term, but it’s reasonable that some focused effort could bump it up 3-5 positions. What’s that worth? For example, if you’re getting 500 visits per day from your #8-ranked listing, you can project that you’d get 1415 visits per day if you could jump to position #3. (500 * 2.83 = 1415) This is a great tool for justifying SEO investments — or for avoiding them. If you can put a dollar value on each clickthrough, you can quickly calculate the relative value of each increase in ranking. By the same token, for some longer-tail searches you might find that there’s just not enough upside potential to justify any expense at all. Let’s revisit our earlier example: if you make an average $5 cpm for clickthroughs from search, and you think it will cost you $1500 (for content development, linkbuilding, etc.) to realize that +5 jump in the SERPs, your net gain of (1415-500=915) 915 new visitors per day would take 328 days to pay for itself: $1500 / (915 visitors/day * $5/1000 visitors) = 328. That seems like a questionable investment — but at a higher CPM, maybe it would make more sense. Not only can you use this grid to project the value of and therefore justify SEO investments, you can prevent yourself from sinking a ton of energy into elevating your rank for keywords that just aren’t driving enough revenue to matter. SERP Rank Value Calculator 1. Enter current traffic level: clickthroughs per day 2. Select old rank in Google SERPs: 1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8   9   10   11   12   3. Select new rank in Google SERPs: 1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8   9   10   11   12   Expect this traffic level: clickthroughs per day By the way, I’ll be at PubCon in Las Vegas next week. I’d be interested to hear your take on ROI for SEO. Please get in touch!

More here: SERP Rank Traffic Calculator

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Here is an interesting article from PHP-Princess.net:

Shared by Chris Dean This is fantastic Building sophisticated educational tools out of cheap parts, Johnny Lee demos his cool Wii Remote hacks, which turn the $40 video game controller into a digital whiteboard, a touchscreen and a head-mounted 3-D viewer. This video just made me flip with excitement! It’s just amazing the things you can do for little cost! The video features a researcher named Johnny Lee who shows us his amazing Wii Remote hacks. Just wow. I’d love to see these hacks implemented in classrooms! Source: TED: Talks Johnny Lee: Creating tech marvels out of a $40 Wii Remote

More here: Wii Remote Hacks

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