What I'm Listening To

I love clever little web 2.0 stuff and things like this:

Basically it publishes what I've been listening to on iTunes.

I'm gonna leave it playing over night and see what crap I've got on there!

Daily Telegraph Wants to Sue Google & Yahoo!

I meant to blog about this the other day, but got sidetracked, but apparently The Telegraph wants to sue Google and Yahoo! because they've been crawling it's site.

I'm sorry, but you're taking the piss right?

Danny has a great piece on it here. It's obvious to any webmaster worth his/her salt that you can prevent Google-bot (virtually all varieties) from crawling your site by using the robots.txt command properly and not just put:

Robots.txt file # All robots will spider the domain User-agent: *
Disallow: */ixale/

If you want to exclude the bots from your content learn how to use robots.txt properly and just don't give your lawyer's kids an extra term at private school.

Also if they actually used the Google Webmaster Tools they could see that they could request urls to be removed.

I'm really struggling at the moment to fully understand what's going on with big business and the internet. I thought we'd come to a period now where most companies with bucks in the bank understood the internet - how wrong could I be!

What I'm listening too:

Big Companies Still Getting SEO So Wrong

It amazes me how many companies don't read the Google Webmaster Guidelines when they think about implementing a major SEO "solution" on their site.

JobSearch.co.uk are owned by a major company HotOnline Ltd. Despite other players in the online recruitment "space" being able to SEO logically without impacting users to a great deal or ignoring the guidelines, JobSearch felt it necessary to create pages specifically for search engines, despite being told not to in the guidelines - "Make pages for users, not for search engines." The text following that line refers to cloaking, but it still amazes me that people think its ok to create pages such as this.

They've even mentioned

"This page provides links to all jobs listed, in a format geared to search engine robots. To perform a search, please go to our home page."

How much of a numpty do they have to be?

Could they not have a page that's within their brand that shows the latest jobs added? If they did it properly with major CSS use then the page would still be light and still link to their newly added jobs.

I just hope they didn't outsource their SEO to a consultant! Tell me they didn't!

P.s. Why do you have to send your CV for this job? It's more of an affiliate model but hey!

Who Said Doorways & Hidden Link Spam Are Dead?

Looking around and some SERPS for a client I noticed that Doorway pages are alive and kicking and living in a corner of the Googleplex.

If you do a search for Aerospace recruitment agencies, you'll see three sites that use doorways:

• TipTopJob;
• TwinServe;
• JP Recruit.

It shocked me that Google still hasn't managed to kick these sites out. The worst culprit is TipTopJob which I've known about for years as I used to do supply SEO consultancy services to the market leaders - but I'm still suprised that the tactics I adviced my clients not to continue with a good 3 years ago are still being used to success today.

The only reason I can see that they've not been kicked out to date is that they've built up some "trust" with Google and they're cutting them some more slack.

I remember having a site using the same sort of format about 3 years ago and it lost 95% of it's Google traffic over night whent they really started to clamp down on duplication. To my mind they've been ratcheting up their duplication onslaught ever since, but some still they're letting some sites through.

Another thing that has peed me off recently is that despite Matt Cutts posting a year ago about a hotel site in Bath, UK that had a shed load of links "hidden" with css to be 1px high. What makes me chuckle is that they've not even tried to hide the formatting in an external css file, it's in the page and even called it "tinytext":

.tinytext { font-size: 1px; color: #FFFFCC; text-decoration: none; line-height: 1px;}

come on Matt, how blatent does it have to be before it's removed from the index?

The site for those that want to know is Villa Magdala.


This is the code that they use to hide the links is below:

<div class="tinytext"><br /><a href="contents.html" class="tinytext">Contents Page</a><br /><a href="description.html" class="tinytext">The Villa Magdala - A Description</a><br /><a href="links.html" class="tinytext">Website Links</a><br /><a href="2000years.html" class="tinytext">'Two Thousand Years of History'</a><br /><a href="directions.html" class="tinytext">Maps, Directions &amp; Travel</a><br /><a href="history.html" class="tinytext">History of the Villa Magdala</a><br /><a href="ideal.html" class="tinytext">'Bath - the Ideal Base'</a><br /><a href="accolades.html" class="tinytext">Accolades &amp; Awards</a><br /><a href="contact.html" class="tinytext">Contact Us</a><br /><a href="roomrates.html" class="tinytext">Room Rates &amp; Tariffs</a><br /><a href="info.html" class="tinytext">Useful Information</a><br /><a href="http://store.ohtee.com/" class="tinytext">Anti-Virus &amp; NOD32 online store</a><br /><br>We are located in Bath in the UK overlooking peaceful Henrietta Park and just minutes level stroll from the historic city<br />centre, offering lovely, top quality hotel (aka guesthouse or bed and breakfast) 5 (five!) Diamond accommodation for a<br />vacation, holiday, business or break in England, UK. Keywords describing our accommodation include room, bath, bed,<br />guesthouse, break, breakfast, Britain (and Victorian Britain, and bed). Located in a classic Georgian street, with Georgian and<br />Victorian architecture abundant - stay in a five Diamond guesthouse in England for your vacation.<br><br />Vacation in a Georgian guesthouse or Roman guesthouse, Villa Magdala hotel, peaceful, bed - and UK accommodation in bath - <br />experience the shopping, park, tourist attractions, vacation, villa, accommodation! For business, or as a tourist on holiday or coming to travel in<br />England in Britain; whether to travel, or on a family (family) holiday with the family or on business in Britain, we would love<br />to welcome you to the Villa Magdala, beautiful Victorian accommodation close to the centre of Roman Bath.<br /></div>

There's me having a site removed because I duplicated the league tables for the EURO 2008 qualifying rounds for my users to see - I made the mistake of putting them on every page of the site, I've also made the mistake in the past of labeling my blog posts - but there's sites actively trying to "game" Google and they get away with it!

Quick SEO Tip of the Day

I highlighted to a client recently that even though they had major on-page duplication issues they should first off look at their [Title] tags and meta data.

For me, when looking at duplication problems this is the first area you should review.

Many site designers and affiliates in particular simply print the same information in the these tags to save time.

In an ideal world you should have you most important keywords in the [title] tag but support them with used "call to actions" such as "Buy Sony MP3 Players" and then support them with a really useful meta description.

This tag should also include the keywords but support them with other searched on "call to action" keywords, maybe "For the Cheapest and best Sony MP3 Players try our online store." If you can very these supporting keywords dynamically then go for it - you need to create as much variation as you can.

If the page you're optimising is a category page then it would be advisable to list all the products, comma separated, in the Meta Keywords tag - just for completeness and because they can be used to help support the theme of the page as well as being useful for Yahoo! if you've included miss-spells.

Take time over the top half of your code - it's the easiest place to be lazy, but where you'll often get the most benefit.

UK Search Engine Share Stats

As many of you know - I'm in love with Hitwise.

And here's one example of the data you can get. I know it's not on the scale of the ASOS traffic source data that I've blogged about recently, but Heather Hopkins recently blogged about the change in UK search engine traffic figures.



The data shows that, despite the best efforts of many affiliates, Google are taking a firmer grip on the UK search market whilst Ask.com are declining. Another worrying thing is that MSN are falling big time. This is in contrast to the assertions of many affiliates that they're getting more traffic from them.

An interesting thing to do would be to compare your site's traffic source percentage against the market as a whole - based on the Hitwise data.

Ex Agent: CIA seed money helped launch Google

Infowars has an article on their opinion that CIA seed money helped launch Google! I'm not sure if this is an April Fools joke but it's worth a read.

Here's a little snippet:

Speaking to the Alex Jones Show, Steele elaborated on his previous revelations by making it known that the CIA helped bankroll Google at its very inception.

"I think Google took money from the CIA when it was poor and it was starting up and unfortunately our system right now floods money into spying and other illegal and largely unethical activities, and it doesn't fund what I call the open source world," said Steele, citing "trusted individuals" as his sources for the claim.

"They've been together for quite a while," added Steele.

"Let me say very explicitly - their contact at the CIA is named Dr. Rick Steinheiser, he's in the Office of Research and Development," said Steele.

Steele highlighted Google's blatant censorship policies whereby press releases put out by credible organizations that are critical of Dick Cheney and other administration members don't make it to Google News even though they are carried by PR Newswire.

I'll refrain from commenting for now.

Ocean Finance Join Numpties Not-So-Anonymous

Do you have to have an IQ test to become an affiliate manager these days?

Thanks to Keith on the A4UForum he's made us all aware of the Ocean Finance Affiliate T&C's which read:

“ZERO TOLERANCE for any web pages appearing in natural listings via the Ocean brand or derivates thereof “

You're kidding me right? Even if I were a finance affiliate I'd not be allowed to build pages promoting your offering? I'd not be allowed to casually build a paragraph or create an imaginitively crafted link like "Ocean Finance"?

You've really got to be chronically anal about your brand if people can't even mention it.

Michael Anthony even commented:

One of our memebers even had an email from Ocean's PPC company asking him to stop bidding on any terms including the word "Finance"!

Elena at TD then replied that Ocean had ammended their T&C's to:

ZERO TOLERANCE for any web pages appearing in natural listings via the Ocean brand or derivates thereof (logo images are available and must be used)

So now you can create copy around them but you can't mention their brand textually but you'll take the effort of putting a banner up.

I know it's not Elena's fault but she did make me chuckle when she remarked:

I believe what they are trying to avoid is having affiliates listed above themselves in the natural search results.

It's understandable why they're worried though! They don't even have "Ocean Finance" in their [Title] tag and they've got dodgy doorway pages linked to from their homepage.

I may even just take up finace affiliating to teach them a lesson.

Selling Links? You've Gotta Label Them as Such

Matt also talks about the big industry in "selling links" and relates it to the FCC's stance that users should be made aware if that site links to another for financial gain. The premise of the FCC's argument is that content may have a bias because of that financial gain.

I completely agree with them. I've often only included merchants in a list of where to get a particular product if I get a commission - it's the first thing you learn in the old Affiliate 101.

With the realisation that you'll make net gains by including non-financially beneficial links in your overall merchant recommendation list more and more sites have started to include these links.

The issue I have is that this is all well and good for sites that you create for natural rankings, it's far from acceptable for sites and pages that you build for ppc. As someone that does a fair amount of PPC I spend a lot of time adding negative keyword matches, getting long-tail keywords and analysing click through rates etc etc to make my rate of return higher that I'm not going to add non-revenue generating links to those sites - simple as.

At the end of the day, these sites are style very useful to users, they show a wide range of sources for a particular product and allows them to scan prices and features very quickly so they don't have to spend half an hour trying different searches.

This is on of my definition of "paid links". And if you look at certain networks, if you don't remove them from the Search Engines' view they'll easily get crawled and indexed - it's happened to me loads!

I don't deal in the other type - paid for flat links. Or just taking some cash for including a simple link to another site, whether it's within content or navigation. For this, how the FCC edict relates depends on whether the purpose is for "paid for a recommendation" of "paid for SEO purposes".

I totally agree that we need to protect users from inappropriate product/site recommendations but I don't see that as Google's job. The government should not use search engines to police their laws.

However, if Google see's it as morally unacceptable because it's just another form of "fooling" users then it's up to them. But where will it end? Will we end up in a "RoboCop" situation where one organisation polices the new world and creates a police state? I'm sure this isn't where Google want to head, but they need to leave some room for the legal term "caveat emptor" to come into it.

In the same breath you can not only say that we're turning the world into a "police state" but also a "nanny state" where business is hampered by those that can understand that ordinary people know that reviews are biased and that people always don't spend days and nights working on sites not to receive a penny in return. Get real, users aren't that dumb, they're capable of going to several sites and weighing up sites and don't view the one in isolation and take if for granted.

So my message to the FCC is, don't restrict trade by assuming that everyone is dumb. Internet retailing is yonks old, people know what to trust and what not to. If people new garden furniture from Tesco direct and not Asda because I link to them then so what, - it's there choice!

My message to Google - be vary careful of what role you want to play in people's lives. We have governments and NGO's telling us how to run our lives. We don't need a search engine telling us to put disclosure text next to an article purely because we'll earn a couple of quid out of it. Understand that people don't use site's in isolation, there's enough fora out there that rate products and sites where speech is relatively free - allow people to do their own research. It's your job to give users the variety of information to allow users to come to reasoned buying decisions - don't blame site owners for their own slant on a merchant.

My message to everyone - Caveat emptor means:

The axiom or principle in commerce that the buyer alone is responsible for assessing the quality of a purchase before buying.

if you buy online then bear this in mind, it's down to you what you buy, no-body else!

Google to Hit "Hidden Links" Sites Harder

Matt Cutts was kind enough to give us a "heads up" (I really hate that phrase, but it's totally apt) about "hidden links". He mentions the often used tactics of white text on a white background, using css to make the links minuscule or making a full-stop a link. He obviously understands the need to format links to match the style of the site, but asserts that it is against their "Webmaster's Guidelines" to actively hide links from human users.

Matt gives an example of one site writing about an upcoming Disney film but within that paragraph linking to a hardcore porn site via a javascript window status=" " and the simple syte="normal text formatting". He comments that this "crosses over into deceptiveness and violates our quality guidelines" - :-(

So if you do use this method to hide links then if you're still determined to be "black hat" then find another method. If you want to be "clean" then be upfront (including me) about your associations with other sites then make links non-hidden so the average Internet user can see that a link exists.

But where is the line drawn? What can you do and what can't you do?

If you look at the three 4 elements to make a link fall within the normal flow of text (assuming normal formatting) you'd need to:

1. style="CURSOR: text;
2. color:#000000
3. TEXT-DECORATION: none"
4. window status=" "

is it any two or three of the four? People often use "TEXT-DECORATION: none" but then match it with an "a.hover" in the style sheet as they just prefer the formating - especially in menus. If you're doing this you may also want to break out the text colour from the base style a.link colour.

Also if you've got an affiliate site and you don't want to make it obvious that it's an affiliate link then surely you've got the right to do "window status=' ' "? The American Federal Trade Commission states that "companies engaging in word-of-mouth marketing, in which people are compensated to promote products to their peers, must disclose those relationships." But does that mean UK sites focusing on UK users should comply to the FTC position? What about UK sites with US users? Are we expected to redirect US users to another version of our site? Or do we just have to put up with the US government agency telling everyone in the World how to do business?

I'm going to separate out my views on this as it's extending the topic a bit far off "hidden links" but we need to categorically understand what we need to do if we do have what could reasonably be construed as "hidden links".

My advice is not to worry about getting your menu links to be formatted with your site, but DO NOT CHANGE THE CURSOR STYLE TO "TEXT"!

Changing the decoration, colour is totally acceptable and changing the status bar is marginally acceptable. But there's a simpler solution.

Any site should be counting out-bound clicks. Any affiliate should be comparing their own click data with that of the merchant or network. It's a great way to see if there's a problem with the tracking. But even better, it's a great way to see if the links you're offering are relevant to the users you have on your site. If you're writing about a product and sending traffic to Woolies for example, and they go out of stock so you're wasting the users' time then it's worth tracking your own data than relying on a network's. You would then offer your visitors a useful alternative.

If you are going to use a click-tracking file, say using a 302 redirect then make sure you put it in a folder and robots.txt it out so you don't confuse the heck out of the search engines, they don't need another copy of the merchants landing page in their system!

Hilton.com Robots.txt Gaff

You've gotta love some people. You get some people in this industry pretending to know what they're talking about but they just end up showing themselves as numpties.

I don't know who is responsible for the robots.txt file on the Hilton.com site but they sure need a slap!

Take a look at the first two lines:

# Daytime instructions for search engines
# Do not visit Hilton.com during the day!

Gawd, did I chuckle when I read this!

But it does raise an interesting point: Wouldn't it be great if you can say to bots "don't crawl between 9am and 5pm"? But obviously it'll be 9am whose time? There has been a suggestion that this can be done in the "Extended Standard for Robot Exclusion", however. My only concern is that if it's based on something like (GMT) which it realistically has to, we would regularly have to change the file to account for daylight savings which obviously doesn't shift at the same time each year and the same time accross the world.

The simple solution, however, is to use "Crawl-delay: 10" (that's seconds) so that if you do have a huge site and a crappy host you can make sure that the site isn't massively effected.

However, Google does actually throttle it's crawl rate when it considers it's putting too much pressure on your server.

For those that are still feeling concerned about their crawl rate, consider adding this to your robots.txt:

User-agent: msnbot
Crawl-delay: 10

User-agent: Teoma
Crawl-delay: 10

User-agent: Slurp
Crawl-delay: 10

For more information about the robots.txt file and seo try the search on the top right-hand side of the page, or look at Wikipedia.

SEO Search Engine

I've had a play around with another one of Google's great services - "Custom Search Engine" and created a search engine that specifically looks at SEO resources. The complete list is below, but if you've got one that you think should be added then please feel free to email me (on the right) and let me know. If you actually want access to the sites included then also drop me a line and I'll add you as a collabarator.

Unfortunately they won't let me remove the ads as I'm not a gov't agency or educational establishment :(

Here's the current list, but I'll be adding more sites in due course.

distilled.co.uk
stuntdubl.com
successful-sites.com
virante.com
sugarrae.com
thatgirlfrommarketing.com
atlaswebservice.com
joostdevalk.nl/blog
highrankings.com
nvisolutions.com
seo-scoop.com
keyrelevance.com
thecaveman.org
ranksmart.com
seroundtable.com
thinkseer.com
refinedlabs.com
ruudhein.com
acsseo.com
webpronews.com
mediadonis.net
alchemistmedia.com
shoemoney.com
ericward.com
searchenginewatch.com
alliance-link.com
delawareintercorp.com
netramind.com
mattcutts.com
leemccoy.co.uk
seobook.com
searchengineland.com
seomoz.org

Get To Know Matt Cutts - 5 Part Video

Go on you want to! Get to know Matt Cutts, inlcluding how he does his job.

In the interview he mentions a load of highly interesting stuff including:

• How he started working for Google.
  He talks about how they've changed how they've crawled over the past 7 years and why they've changed from the Google Dance to Everflux - daily pushes of data; how the SERPS are renders pages (what's on the pages) and the algorythm updates.
• His favourite Google rumours he's debunked such as using Adwords will help natural rankings and the Spammer who said that his doorways were "undetectable".
• How search engines are working together in some areas of the search industry.
• How do people optimise for the new personalised version of Google Search. Matt sees it as a "seed change" in the industry due to the need for looking at the longtail.
• Search marketers should be thinking of the entire portfolio of Google products.
• We should also be looking at which devices people use to view our content.
• Google spam is getting less and less

Matt Cutts' keynote speech at SES London 07 - Part 1


Matt Cutts' keynote speech at SES London 07 - Part 2


Matt Cutts' keynote speech at SES London 07 - Part 3


Matt Cutts' keynote speech at SES London 07 - Part 4


Matt Cutts' keynote speech at SES London 07 - Part 5

SEO Ranking Factors

What I love about my new Nokia N95 is that whilst I was visiting my mother with my other half I could fully use the interregnum between myself waking up and Laura finally stirring by getting some research done using the N95's RSS Feed and Podcast download facility.

One of the feeds I got was from SEOMoz.org revisiting the their Ranking Factors survey. It certainly gave a fantastic jolt from my slumber when I read the title. I found my way to pressing the "continue" link on the feed and started to gorge myself on the information - not a typical Sunday morning I know!

As I was reading it I realised that this is the information I needed to hopefully convince beyond any doubt that the recommendations I have come up for them are the right course of action, and hence they should put their resources into the areas I've indicated.

Much of the time I have the problem with clients that they've read about SEO five/six years ago and had a degree of success that those same rules still apply. Another problem is that I often come across potential clients that have received those spammy emails saying that they can be ranked at the top of Google for their keywords within weeks.

Clients with incomplete or inadequate information is one of the troublesome issues that professional Search Engine Optimisation consultants have. It drives me up the wall when you have a client saying that they should take some keywords out of the title tag because they think "it'll help SEO". Or others that think they can arbitrarily link to all their sites from each other in a nice neat line at the bottom of each homepage. Or think they can get away with having ten's of thousands of very similar pages and not expect Google to come along with a nice big axe one day.

Even worse is when you've implemented a policy such as extending the variation and sample of keywords used in the title tag that they think they can just play around with that tag and not expect any of the previous hard work to be undone.

So according to the SEOMoz group what are the most important factors to look at when SEOing?

1. Keyword Use in Title Tag
2. Global Link Popularity of Site
3. Anchor Text of Inbound Link
4. Link Popularity within the Site
5. Age of Site
6. Topical Relevance of Inbound Links
7. Link Popularity of Site in Topic
8. Keyword Use in Body Text
9. Global Link Popularity of Linking
10. Rate of New Inbound Links to Site

And what are the top 9 negative factors:

1. Server is Often Inaccessible to Bots
2. Content Very Similar or Duplicate of Existing Content in the Index
3. External Links to Low Quality/Spam Sites
4. Duplicate Title/Meta Tags on Many Pages
5. Participation in Link Schemes or Actively Selling Links
6. Overuse of Targeted Keywords (Stuffing/Spamming)
7. Very Slow Server Response Times
8. Inbound Links from Spam Sites
9. Low Levels of Visitors to the Site

Having a widely agreed list and ordering of factors, although not coming from Google themselves, acts as a fantastic too for those in the SEO game. If you speak to any SEO'er who says that they never have any problems convincing clients to take a particular course of action are talking bollocks!

Also it proves a wonderful tool to debate with others involved in the SEO industry. There are many that decry simple link popularity, despite "link popularity" in one form or another accounting for 7 out of the top 10 most important positive ranking factors!

When I've got time I'll do my own "Simple SEO Steps" taking into account my own experiences and views and mixing them with the SEOMoz study - hopefully you'll find it useful?

Where ASOS Get's Its Traffic From

Again, looking at the March Hitwise newsletter there's an great piece about social networking sites and fashion retailers.

The text from the email is (I hope they don't mind):

TopShop.co.uk and ASOS.com received more than twice as much traffic from MySpace than from MSN and Yahoo! Search combined in the week ending February 24. The #2 source of UK visits to TopShop.co.uk was MySpace, accounting for 5% of traffic. MSN UK Search and Yahoo! UK Search each accounted for just over 1% of visits, whilst MySpace was the #5 source ofvisits to ASOS.com. Visits from MySpace to TopShop.co.uk are up five-fold year on year and up two-fold to ASOS.com.

Although Miss Selfridge and New Look attract a similar demographic profile of young women, these websites do not enjoy the same volume of traffic from MySpace. TopShop has a profile on MySpace with a blog that includes special offers and discounts, and ASOS and TopShop are mentioned on several profile pages.

This offers a great example of creative brands that are engaging withtheir audience on the terms - and turf - of their audience.

So perhaps they don't need affiliates? Or are they just concerned that all these people linking to them for free will convert their links to affiliate ones and end up costing them shed loads of cash? It's frightening when you think the number of visits from MySpace to ASOS have doubled in the past year.

Do this however, provide an opportunity for MySpace to hijack these links? Think of the potential revenue. And with News Corp. behind them now, I wouldn't be surprised if they haven't considered it.

However, ASOS should be thinking of the opportunities, MyTravel climbed 22 places from 34 in the list to 12 - I wonder how much was from the efforts of affiliate marketers?

Ooh those grubby geeks with no social skills hey? Nearly as bad as pubescent teenagers writing about what clothes they want. We're not much different are we, we're both passionate about what we do, but us affiliates are more interested with making money than making friends - it's a shame that ASOS only seem to be concerned with making enemies!

Fastest Growing News and Media Sites

Going back to March's Hitwise newsletter, it's pretty interesting to see the sites that we've know about for a while, because we work in the industry, become mainstream.

It happened with Google, many of us were spending a very small amount of time back along trying to work out how to get to the top. Now the fastest growing news and media site is Digg.com. Now we're all trying to make the most of the site and leverage it's audience for our own end.

But you'll need to look at what was happening in January. From my recollection (and the bruises of trying to fix my garden fence) it was when we had the gales, so it's not surprising to see the Weather hitting the top ten.

Hitwise UK Websites with the Largest Growth in Market Share of Visits Among
the Top 100 News and Media Websites Comparing January 2007 and January 2006

1. Digg.com www.digg.com 456%
2. CNET www.cnet.com 255%
3. Weather.com www.weather.com 198%
4. Yahoo! UK & Ireland Weather uk.weather.yahoo.com 160%
5. Yahoo! UK & Ireland News uk.news.yahoo.com 105%
6. Metro.co.uk www.metro.co.uk 94%
7. Blackwell Synergy www.blackwell-synergy.com 88%
8. UK Wind Map www.xcweather.co.uk 72%
9. Daily Mail www.dailymail.co.uk 68%
10. Computer Active www.computeractive.co.uk 61%

What's Going To Be Hot 2nd 1/2 2007

Last year I did pretty well predicting what would be hot for Christmas. I obviously build sites around them and ppc them like crazy.

But I found there was so much going on at the end of the year that I found it almost impossible to make the most out of all the opportunites. So what I'm going to do is try and create a list of the "Hot Products of 2007" but have an affiliate marketing twist. You'll see many lists in magazines such as Maxim, Time etc. But quite often they don't have angles where you can realistically make affiliate cash out them.

But quite often there are products that are due to come out that are absolutely prime for affiliates creating sites and ppc'ing. A little health warning here. I'll be linking to some of the sites I've created about them and sometimes I'll mention products that I have domains for but haven't set anything up. You're obviously free to take the information and do your own work - you'll probably do it anyway!

1) The first of these products is the new "Laser TVs". This is a new type of HD TV, and there are many including the SED variety. These TV's are due to be out by Christmas this year and should definitely be in the mind of any electronics affiliate.

2) The next I'm going to list is the fantastic new "Onyx phone" which makes my Nokia N95 look like a 1980's brick phone. I'm hoping it'll be out this year, but you never know! I've not seen any merchants mention this phone or put it in their "coming phones" sections, but I'm sure if it comes out this it'll be a big hit.

3) Another area that traditionally does well are products that tie in with television programmes. At the moment Anthea Turner is doing the "Perfect Housewife" show. I'd thought I'd have a dable at doing a v. quick (and ugly) site to see how it goes. It's quite easy to rank in MSN, but Google is another thing. I didn't really think it through as commissions are only a few pence each time and not really worth the effort when you compare it against other stuff I could be doing. But at least I got to do something different for a half hour.

4) I don't do a massive amount of mobile phones, I'm more of a gadget, consumer goods affiliate - but to me mobiles are getting more gadgety every month. You've got the N95 which I love but coming out in the next few months is the Nokia N77, affiliates that do mobiles should really be prepared for this by now. I've bagged a good domain but I was supprised when you've got the retailers who normally pick them up very quickly. The beauty about this phone however is that it can pick up digital TV, well it will do when the UK has the DVB-H signal sorted - even though they've got it ready in Albania!!

5) It's mobile time, not to feel out done, Microsoft has indicated that they're going to launch the Zune Phone. Now this does look very interesting. It appears they've got fantastic features, including WiFi etc. But there's one that Apple won't be able to cope with and that's the ability to connect to a games device - the XBox360. I'm thinking this should do very well with gamers. And it's not not only Microsoft that are getting in with mobile telecoms. Nintendo are planning to launch a Wii Phone too. But I'm not sure when this is due to be released.

6) How could I forget the pre-order Halo 3 event of the century? It should be massive!! I've done a site for them and tested a new way of doing ppc sites so we'll see what happens.

7) I have no doubt the pink products will do well again. The pink psp, pink ps2 and the pink gba sold in their thousands last year and are the sort of products that parents fall back on.

8) Obviously people will be looking for 2008 calendars as well.

Product Feed Scripts Reviews - ShopWindow

I know I'm more technical than some, but woefully lacking in development skills than most other affiliates. Obviously there are many strategies that affiliates could use to earn revenues such as ppc, email marketing etc. The one I preferred when I first started affiliate marketing was SEO. And boy did I make some handy cash out of it - 5 figures a month (excluding decimal points ;-) )

Most of this revenue was generated from creating massive, keyword-dense sites that focused on particular niches. They worked fantastically well for a good couple of years. Then Mr G got annoyed with them so I had to learn PPC and rely on other forms of residual income I developed (I won't go into them).

So basically for for 18 months or so I did chuff all work, a little blogging and some good amount of PPC at Christmas. Basically I needed a break, time to get my fascination with SEO back again.
But now affiliate SEO has moved on. There's the old tactic of utilising product feeds which have it's obvious pitfalls with cross-site duplications (merchant - affiliate ¹ - affiliate ⁿ) and obviously blogging.

But surely leveraging the both together is a profitable approach? Using a product or industry focused blog deeplinking into product searches on the relevant product is the way forward? This way you get the traffic and regular users to the blog but also have the ability to build up useful pagerank [Brendon] to the feed site which then filters through to the products you've not directly promoted.

This is something I'm going to test on my much neglected DAB Radios site. I've very quickly amended the Affiliate Window ShopWindow script to build a DAB Radio Shop. I know the design is crap and I haven't worked out how to get the right products on the homepage, but it's a start.

But how could it be improved?

1) The above, tinkering with homepage to get the niche products in. If you can specify the left hand nave easily, you should be able to do the same with the "Hot Products". I don't like having to go through and changing a parameter in several different places. If you can specify the homepage in the global.inc script then you should be able to specify other constants.

2) Better commenting within the scripts to say what exactly each part does so we can modify easily.

3) The same could be said of the CSS file - it needs explanation. Without using Firebug for Firefox it would have been a lot more of a nightmare.

4) Quota - it starts off so low. I started some test ppc on it and it ran out a hell of a lot quicker than I thought. An amendment could be that when your quota runs out it emails you.

5) Tracking ID's - We know that you can track particular links with Awin. But they all defult to a ShopWindow tracking id. There should be the opportunity to specify a format such as: [sitename]_[catID]_[prodID] or [sitename]_[searchquery] . Surely something of that nature would have been a whole more useful to affiliates?

6) Back to documentation. There should be an easy way (for those that can't "grep"] to look up a particular function referenced on their forum or in one script and find out where else it's referenced.

7) The ability for users to specify a min/max price - surely it can't be too difficult to categorise?

8) Dividing the products into Brands and features. Surely if a couple of my mates can do this, then the mighty Awin can?

9) Differentiation - the main problem product feed affiliates is making your site different from the others that use the same feed. The ability to "rewrite" set phrases would be good, but obviously there may be the legal implications relating to advertising copy.

Overall, I'm not massively impressed, especially when you compare it to the PageRank10 scipts that I used on the Euro 2008 site for Football Shirts. Here I've managed to use their Kitbag script and include the feeds from two other merchants. I know I've messed up some of the categorisation, but I find this script significantly better than the ShopWindow one.

There are two areas where ShopWindow is better than PageRank 10:

1) New products are automatically added - i.e. it runs itself when you're on holiday or working on other stuff.
2) You don't have to ftp huge csv file - if you've got bandwidth limits it could be a problem.

I'm yet to try DataFeed Manager from John Jupp et al, but I'll be taking a look in due course.

If anyone has got any other scripts they'd like to promote, review then feel free to comment on this post.

Top Appliance And Electronics Sites - Hitwise

Here's what Hitwise says that were the top Appliances and Electronics sites in the UK.

Rank Website

1. Currys www.currys.co.uk
2. Comet UK www.comet.co.uk
3. The Orange Shop shop.orange.co.uk
4. Ebuyer www.ebuyer.com
5. Maplin Electronics www.maplin.co.uk
6. T-Mobile UK www.t-mobile.co.uk
7. Carphone Warehouse www.carphonewarehouse.com
8. dabs.com www.dabs.com
9. Dixons Online www.dixons.co.uk
10. e2save.com www.e2save.com

I always find data like this interesting. Another aspect is that we've all got our own perception of the retailers. For instance, Currys to me they've been a poor converter and I can't be bothered with them. Comet used to be one I'd make a bee-line for, but the way it looks like they've been treating affiliates stinks big time!

But the data I'd love to have (I don't have access to that industry with Hitwise as this is the free data before some Mr. A. Hole complains) is what proportion of their traffic is generated by affiliate marketing?

What I do have is the categories of the upstream traffic:

Top 10 Upstream Industries

1. Computers and Internet 50.97%
2. Search Engines 38.00%
3. Shopping and Classifieds 31.66%
4. Appliances and Electronics 10.64%
5. Rewards and Directories 9.69%
6. Business and Finance 8.60%
7. Entertainment 5.12%
8. Telecommunications 4.73%
9. Computers 3.10%
10. Department Stores 3.07%

The Search engine category is part of the top "Computers and Internet" but it's interesting that "Shopping and Classifieds" and "Rewards and Directories" together account for 40% of their upstream traffic. Seeng as both these categories are heavily affiliated then you could see the potential power that affiliates collectively hold.

It would be so interesting to see how a merchant would suffer financially if affiliates decided not to promote them. Could it result in lay-offs, Stock Exchange announcements?

For those that are in the top 10, well done. But I hope that you continue to work with affiliates in a constructive manner!