SEO Expert – Venetsian Jacks

All of you probably know that SEO is all about links and more links. It was confirmed by many SEOs and even Search Engine Spokesmen that Links are the primary ranking factor in Contextual Search Engines.

Since day one SEOs and other consulting firms specialize in Link Trading and Link Buying. It is well known that for good rankings you must have a lot of good links, especially in high competition market niches.

Link Trading or better known as Link Exchange is a very slow process in which you have to contact webmasters in your niche and hope that they will be interested in swapping links with you. Not to mention that many experienced ones will not trade you if you don’t have strong Google Page Rank, therefore Link Exchange is practically impossible with new sites.

Best way to boost up your rankings and gain some Page Rank is to purchase some links. In order to do so you will have a fair budget and the skills to find cheap high quality links.

There are many ways to find a good link, but the most important one despite the high dispute in the webmaster world is still Google Page Rank.

Google PR can be seen if you install the Google Toolbar and enable PageRank bar (from the toolbar settings). This green bar will become your N:1 friend in your link building campaign.

PageRank is a number from 0 to 10. It is calculated using special algorithm which is not disclosed by Google, but from quick observation you can notice that PR is spread in some sort of Geometrical Progression.

One of the most interesting and important things about Page Rank is the way PR flows between websites and inside internal pages. This is highly speculated area since this is the most secretive algorithm heavily guarded by Search Engine Engineers, but there is some public information on how it works.

Based on the PageRank distribution, the value of the Initial Page (Linking Page) is based on — NOTE: page, not website since websites contain many pages —.

For example:
PR1 = 8 points
PR2 = 64 points
PR3 = 512 points
PR4 = 4096 points
PR5 = 32768 points
PR6 = 262144 points
PR7 = 2097152 points
PR8 = 16777216 points
PR9 = 134217728 points
PR10 = 1073741824 points
(Note that this type of calculation is nowhere near precise!).

It is theorized that each link, including internal links to the same website, are counted with nearly equal value, although recent findings confirm that links found on top half portion of the page are valued slightly more than the ones on the lower portion. I’m pretty much certain that this is Search Engine’s answer to link selling as it tries to discount the value of “un-natural” links in the footer of many websites as they are with the sole purpose of boosting search rankings.

The main goal in link buying and main purpose of this link buying guide is to highlight the importance of Link Juice Calculation. Link Juice is basically the amount of “PR juice” your link will take from each linking page. It is really simple to calculate the number of links on a page and divide the total PR value of that page to that number in order to find the actual “Link Juice Value”. Using this simple formula you will be easily able to estimate which link deal is best for you since no page is equal to another.

In order to make your life even more complicated, Search Engines estimate the value of passed PageRank based on Topical Relevance.

Topical relevance is pretty much the “theme” or “niche” of the website. It is assumed that similar topic link pages are passing more Link Juice than others. It is important to note here that all links pass some sort of value since no search engine can be 100% sure that websites don’t have anything in common (for example same webmaster/owner), but still it is times better if they are in relevant topic or atleast have the link keyword repeated somewhere on that same page in order to show relevant context. Link Cloaking is pretty much a form of art. The goal here is to imitate non-SEO-influenced content as if a real blogger or forum user would pass you organic link. We can see that some SEOs prefer to buy “paragraph” of text with a link inside, rather than going with a single link. I would suggest that if possible.

Another really important thing is called Link Age. It is generally accepted that Links age like fine wine. The older one gets, the more link juice it passes, so don’t be alarmed if you purchased some high PR links and your website did not gain any Page Rank on the next google update. Note that PR gaining is a slow process and you will rarely gain pr 5-6 from a newly developed website.

If you purchase good quality relevant link with decent PR, you should be able to feel increase in Search Engine Position for that page+keyword within week or two. Note that the higher PR one linking page is the faster this process is. As I’ve mentioned previously you may get sudden increase then drop a bit, and then increase to a stable top position within few weeks (as link ages).

My last note is about the Importance of SEO as a constant effort. If you do some SEO and get your desired positions, you must NEVER STOP! If you stop then some competitor will most probably take you down. If you show persistent work your rankings will defeat your competition.

If you follow those few rules, you should be able to boost your website up the search engine rankings.

Where do we start? Check out the Digital Point Forum for great deals on link exchanges and sales.

If you want to share something with us, please comment this post.

Venetsian Link Building

What is interesting is that the expected 2008-2010 declination in many marketing niches, the financial sector flourishes showing 200% increase in Average Cost Per Click.

Jan 2008 – $1.82, March 2008 – $2.00, July 2008 – $2.15, Aug 2008 – $2.95, Nov 2008 – $3.23
Jan 2009 – $2.99, Feb 2009 – $3.23, Jun 2009 – $3.60, Jul 2009 – $4.21, Aug 2009 – $4.81, Sep 2009 – $4.25

It seems that clearly the Financial Sector is not suffering any losses. It is only the regular people who suffer from the high APR rates.

The retail market seems to be picking up slowly with the expected fall shopping spree although a bit lower than last year with approximately 15%.

After all it seems that the online advertising market is increasing in budget with all marketing companies which directly results into better CPC for website owners.

What can you suggest?

Start building more websites. Blogs seems to be the best deal since content is easily published and ads can be well hidden. Seems WordPress is currently the industry leading solution.

If you want to start a new blog, we can offer you $3.95 WordPress hosting package here

Venetsian AdSense adsense

Again back to the good old SEO. After few months of development, I’m back to Search Marketing. In this post I would like to point out the main basic things about SEO as well as basic SEO Terminology

KEYWORD = Keywords are the set of one, two, and three words used to describe particular interest on some topic. For example if you have a website dedicated to a service or a product, then the keywords can be the name of your service or products.

KEYWORD DENSITY = The number of times your target keyword is found on that page.

KEYWORD RESEARCH TOOLS are provided by most search engines in their PPC advertising sections, but a very good source can be the WordTracker.com search database as it contains many refining options helping you track down niche marketing in much better details.

LINKS = Bookmark like shortcults on other websites poiting to your website.

LINK TEXT = ANCHOR TEXT = Most links contain short text labels which are ofter few words in length and describe “relevant” information that one user should expect to see on the linked page. Link Text carries the highest SEO value for good search engine result position.

SE = Search Engine – Google.com, Yahoo.com, Live.com, Bing.com, AOL.com, and few hundreds small ones.

SEO = Search Engine Optimization – The engineering field that covers search engines and their ranking techniques and algorithms. SEO’s Goal is to manipulate and increase a websites’ rankings for particular set of keywords that is often used by Search Engine Users to define the content of your website.

SERP = Search Engine Result Position is the position your website shows when searched for a target keyword on Search Engines. This is the main thing SEO is concerned about.

Venetsian SEO

As odd as it may sound, the latest version of WordPress contains a deadly bug – the while screen of death as some developers call it. Unfortunately a client of mine was a victim of this new killer bug which is currently not fixable.

Why wordpress is showing blank screen?
In general WordPress as all PHP software is supposed to show parse errors instead of empty screens when an error occurs, unfortunately this is not the case. In our problem, wordpress uses the so called Output Object/Buffer Handlers where it can manipulate what is printed on the screen like the code below:

// start output buffering
ob_start();
print("something");
print("more stuff");
// now clean the output buffer as nothing was ever printed on the screen
ob_end_clean();

Many programmers find this extremely useful when debugging large and complex software, but in some cases, this can be a rather complicated bug for the inexperienced developers. Note that I’m not saying that “we” are not experienced, but that if you are not familiar with the details of the inner-workings of this software you may not be able to troubleshoot such errors as the one we currently have.

Files affected by this bug
I’ve noticed that the wp-config.php has been changed as the last ?> php was missing on the bottom of the file. If this is the case then just add it and your wordpress will work fine. Others reported a blank link on top of the wp-config file. If you remove this blank line and start with

What is the cause of WordPress white screen of death?
Currently I have absolutely no clue, but I’m pretty sure that it has to do something with wrong regular expression changes inside the system core or even maybe potential security exploit. Based on my research I found that:
Replacing the wordpress system files from a new copy DOES NOT WORK.
Restoring Database of a Previous DB Dump DOES NOT WORK.
After I restored the whole account with full account Backup fixed the issue, but did not leave any clues on what may have been the problem.

What systems are vulnerable to this bug
Currently I know (almost for certain) that APACHE running with SuExec is the only system having this problem. Seems that this type of bug is closely associated with file/folder permissions which implies that the error is caused by file modifications.

How to fix?

As it may sound strange, but in our case I’ve added a newly created text file with the name php.ini with only one line of code inside “display_errors = 1″ (no quotes) and it worked. Check it out yourself.
Download PHP.INI here and then upload it to your wordpress root folder.

Post if this works for you.
Venetsian.

Venetsian wordpress wordpress

As you all know content is the most important thing online. The more unique content one website has, the better its ranking and traffic will be. Well, that’s generally true in many niches, but nowadays Google is making our lives even more complicated by asking us to have More, and NEW content.

If you feel overloading with work, then you won’t like what I have to say. Yes, it is all related with YOU doing something more. Well, yes you have to write more, and you have to write every day to make it to the top. This process won’t end, ever. So keep up overloading yourself until you fall out like this poor donkey.

This story start with a very important (not even recent) event — the .com boom. Well, I’m not literally referring to the .com boom, but the ever increasing web space. As you may already know, the WEB is increasing in size every year with approximately 50%, and nowadays (FALL 2009) you can find EVERYTHING online. This pretty much means that whatever content you write on your website, there will be at least few dozen other website who wrote on the same topic and atleast few of them will be nearly the same wording-content.

In order for Google and the other search engines to keep up with this increasing quantity, they came up with a pretty ingenious idea

rate content based on 1) freshness and 2) quality.

Well you may have noticed that already that when you post a new page, it goes on top of the SERPs for few days, then suddenly drops down to the unknown. You are not the only one. It seems that google gives high value to recently introduced content and ranks it based on search clicks. If you introduce new page it will stay longer if it gets more click, if not then it will quickly vanish. Eventually all new content is being replaced with other new content or already established website content from “Authority Websites”.

As you know authority websites are different matters since they are either the first websites introducing that topic/niche, or they are “manually” qualified as such (ex: wikipedia). As far as I know, new SEOs are not capable of fighting authority sites with small budgets, therefore I will not be covering it in this post. I will just say that it is very hard to outrank authority sites if you are not already authority on that subject.

Now back to freshness. If you write on regular basis, no matter how many authority sites there are on your topic, you will still get some decent traffic. Well, its a lot of work, but that’s something unavoidable.

Venetsian SEO SEO, traffic building

Comment spam seems to be one of the most common wordpress blogger problems. There are many tools to fight it, but it seems few of them are only the real solution to the problem. In this post, I’ll explain what wordpress comment spam is and how to defend yourself from it, as well as some of the really bad effects of spam to your website.

Since the beginning of wordpress, comment spam has became really popular SEO and eMarketing tool. Yes the people who do it are very well paid, and this type of website marketing is really popular and very dangerous. The biggest problem with it is that most of its utilizes are pharmaceutical companies and all their vendors which seem to be millions. I’m not sure what kind of money are involved with the whole thing, but I can ensure you that many search engines tried to stop them, but they still seem to be fully active. Just try to Google some pill and you’ll find around 50 million paged dedicated only to the V-pill and pretty much the same on other alternatives. Unfortunately to get such high results you’ll need massive — yes I most definitely mean virtually millions of pages — to rank on the first 100 results and that’s where WordPress and other blogging software comment spam comes in play.

There is a large discussion in the SEO world of the negative effect of commend spam. It is considered that link spam quite bad since most of the links are from the so called “bad neighborhoods”, but Google (the Search Engine’s) point of view is devious. Some say that websites are be penalized if they link to spam sites, others say that spam is simply part of the real life and websites are not penalized. Well, I’m not sure which one is right, but to be on the safe side I strongly recommend that you don’t link to any of those and therefore protect your site from nasty comment links. It is not only that they are bad links, they are also links which leak your PR and your website is devalued, therefore they really BAD. We should not even think about duplicate content because 100% of this comment spam is also on other sites which brings down your overall website quality drastically.

Comment Spam is a relatively simple technique which uses automated commenting scripts to inject into different type of website applications. If you’re a wordpress user and your website has some backlinks you’ll be most definitely getting few hundred comment spams a day, and maybe even thousands for larger websites. This massive spam required software developers to come out with different defense techniques, some of which are extremely popular as the Akismet plugin for wordpress, which seems to be pretty much the best solution out there. Unfortunately Akismet should not be the only anti-spam application you are running.

Lately I’ve been having rather strange problem. My website seemed to overload quite a bit, and all my efforts to optimize it with WP-Super-Cache and other similar plugins did nothing. This made me look a bit deeper into the whole problem and try to figure out what exactly caused its high load. I saw that there are few hundred akismet spam messages filtered every day, but I didn’t think that it is possible for them to do all this load. After a bit more careful analysis I found out that they can and they do cause all my high CPU load. It seems that a comment is first processed by wordpress and akismet in some weird way to figure out if it may be a spam, then a automated request for verification is sent to the wordpress API page where a pass or fail signal is sent. This delay in processing the request seems to be generating some of the load, and combined with few hundred other message injections it ended up into a considerably high amount of resources wasted on spam comments. This made me look a bit further into wordpress ani-spam plugins.

The first good wordpress spam filter seemed to be the CAPTCHA type of plugins. Ironically most simple captchas are already broken and crafty comment spam software seems to be able to avoid them (well, I figured out that after testing few different apps for a day or two). The best one, which also seemed most user friendly as it supported Audio text narration for the really unreadable text, seems to be ReCaptcha. It is a free “service” which requires a free registration. You can install it with the Automated WordPress Plugin Installer just search for reCatcha and you’ll find it. After installation it will give you the url for registration and you can get the API code from there.

It is quite unfortunate that reCaptcha and Akismet didn’t fix my load issue although they stopped 100% of the wordpress comment spam, which is still a great achievement. It seemed that reCaptcha was testing the client/visitor side, but the nasty spammers injected their comments directly into the wordpress-comments.php script which somehow bypassed it. I needed better defense system. This is where low level web server protection comes in.

I accidentally found out that most of the comment spam software is utilizing Pearl CGI scripts, and fortunately for all of us, pearl has special signature which is easily recognizable by firewall software. For this type of applications the low level apache module called Mod_Security seems to be the ultimate weapon in our wordpress defense program. By setting up a simple pearl crawler block which is actually built-in the default mod_security definitions. After a day of testing I’ve noticed 50% load decrease while all the visitor traffic was the same.

The best thing I found, which I already wrote about in some previous posts on War against the Content Scrapers where I’m commenting my problems with duplicated content issues as also mostly utilizing pearl and php scripts. Mod_Security also has option to block all unknown user-agents which is pretty much what I’m suggesting in my previous post. In this way you protect yourself from comment spammers as well as duplicate content scrapers.

I think I forgot to mention that mod_security is apache module and therefore you will have to recompile apache with it. To do this you will have to have root access to the server and if you don’t have your own VPS or Dedicated Server then you have to check if your web host can set it up for you. If your host doesn’t have it, you can check out our $3.95 per month wordpress hosting service from maiahost.com which supports mod_security as well as Suhosin (another wordpress protection server module).

If you have better suggestions please keep me posted. I’m 100% spam secure now so don’t try to spam me he he he ..

Venetsian wordpress comment spam, wordpress, wordpress spam

Reliable web hosting? Well that’s pretty much the same as saying Expensive Web Hosting. I’ll explain here why.

Why do you need reliable web hosting?

Well, if you don’t want to have frequent website failures, data loss or being treated like an idiot from your web hosting provider, then you most probably need reliable web hosting provider. The worst thing you ever want is your website which you’ve invested so much development efforts to suddenly go offline because your host was not careful and did something stupid. If you have good website, with good traffic and good income, do not hesitate to invest in better, more reliable web hosting provider, otherwise you may wake up one day and find your website gone, hacked or spreading viruses to your own visitors/clients. Everyone, every self respecting professional should rely on a reliable hosting provider instead of cheap resellers who get your money and suddenly disappear along with your hard labor!

What is Reliable web hosting

We all judge the quality of one web hosting service provider by the sum of quality points for few major properties such as support level, server configuration restrictions, website speed and hardware reliability. Unfortunately all of those parameters are directly linked to the costs associated with that parameter and if one desires to obtain good overall web hosting reliability it will be quite costly at the end, but fortunately for us we can have some turnarounds are have very good reliability at most affordable prices based on the formula I’m giving you at the end of this post. I would like to stress the fact that the costs of reliability are also directly linked to your own webmaster skills since the more experience you have the cheaper your hosting is. But before we start I would like to explain what exactly web hosting actually is and what is involved in the whole thing.

What is Support Level

Based on my personal experience I’ve found out that there are few very important things to consider before purchasing a hosting plan from a new (to you) company. It is quite unfortunate that nowadays web hosting reviews are not really accurate as most of them as paid by the actual web hosting company and most of the times deviate from the truth. In order to really acquire some early on experience is to contact them with some simple pre-sales questions that will give you the basic idea of they will be good support or not. For example you can ask the following questions:

question: Hi, I’m interested in purchasing a web hosting from you guys, but I was wondering if (my desired package here) is running on raid hard drive configuration for data security?

If you get answer like, “I don’t know” or “no” or they’re not really quick on answering this question, then most probably this is not a good company for you to start hosting with since you’ve learned two very important thing from a single answer and those are that a) they don’t have any data loss prevention device, and b) their support may not have experience in the web hosting industry. If they say “yes” and are quick to say it, then you should try to get some more information by asking some common hosting problem issues.

question: Hi, with my previous web hosting company I used to have some file permission errors and I had to change each file manually. Is that the same with you?

In most cases file permission errors are if your host is not running PHP SuEXEC which is vital to file writing and modification which is nowadays used by all Content Management Systems (CMS) such as Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal, CMS MS and etc. SuEXEC is also considered to be with better security because if it is missing you risk of being hacked by another hacked account on the same server since all accounts are with same user “nobody” if SuExec is not enabled. Based on my experience SuEXEC is really helpful since allows smooth CMS operation especially if you’re new to the web hosting industry and don’t know how to change file permissions yourself.

question:One of my websites was injected with malware which was caused by bad web hosting security. Do you know if you guys have this problem or it was fixed with your servers?

At some point everybody had his site hacked atleast once (my photo gallery Gallery 2 was hacked last fall and injected with a Trojan Horse which pretty much made me remove the whole CMS due to high security risks!). Based on my own hosting experience that CMS hacks seem to be common but there are also common preventions which are eventually implemented with the hosting companies. It is a good idea to ask the host early in the presales if you will be having this problem because it is a serious issue which you should be really careful as if hacked your website may start sending SPAM emails and even redirect your search engine traffic to other websites (yes that is possible and its really hard to find if you don’t monitor your traffic stats carefully).

If you get satisfying answers to the above questions you should ask few more with which you will be able to determine how much help your web will give you if you accidentally get in trouble. Note that those questions are based on your current experience and if you feel somehow knowledgeable about them you should not bother to ask, but if you don’t know how to handle them its good idea to know if you will be getting help or not. Also note that some web hosts do not include FREE help in non-web-hosting-issues which can sometimes be all your questions if you don’t have previous webmaster experience. For example you should not expect your web host to explain/teach/do stuff that is supposed the-webmaster-duties such as uploading/changing/modifying themes, content and etc. Some web hosts do that but in almost all cases this is paid separately per hour labor. What you should also ask the web hosting provider is what you are offered as free support:

question: What is uncluded in the free support for (my hosting package).

If you get that all support is paid then you most probably will get good quality support but at a price. It is quite dangerous if you they tell you that all their support is free, which basically means that you will get no support at all. It is considered better to have paid but reliable (when you need it) support rather than limited or virtually no support. As I said above this is also one of the things you should base upon your own experience and if you don’t need much support you can go with the free support hosting providers. You should also ask what type of support is offered for you:

question: If I ever need support what is the fastest way to contact you and get response? Also what’s the typical response time on support tickets/emails?

The final question before purchasing your new hosting package is to check out what contact means your host is providing. It is really best if you have (even limited) phone support [You should even call them on the phone to obtain that information instead of live chat or email] and also ticketing system (much better than emails but harder to manage). If they offer contact phones to both sales/billing and technicians you’ve just found your new web hosting provider, otherwise you should check few more companies and compare what they offer before running with this one. Note that it is industry standard to have telephone sales/billing support and ticketing/email support for technical questions so don’t run away if you get that, although its great if they offer phone tech support!

I guess those 3-4 questions will give you a good idea of what you’re getting involved with as all the other parameters can not be directly interviewed and require you to build your own experience with that company which may be in the first few days. That’s why you should ask (check) if your web hosting provider is offering 30 day full money back guarantee which will hopefully reduce the risks you might experience. Based on my own experience if you’re not happy with your hosting within the first few days, then you should not hesitate to cancel and find other company to host your websites.

Server Configuration Restrictions

I’ve intentionally left this one as second since most new webmasters won’t really need much and they’re better off with more support, but if you are experienced webmaster then your set of tools is your best weapon and the more access you have the most freedom to grow your website. Based on my own experience I find two major Website Hosting Control Panels to be CPanel and Plesk. There are many other CUSTOM ones, but in most cases I would advise you to get a host with one of them instead of custom because those seem to contain a standard set of web hosting controls which guarantee that you will be able to perform most configuration changes in order to run a successful website. Unfortunately this may not be present in custom ones and in such cases its better to go with CPanel as it offers most flexibility (if fully enabled by your provider since they can limit some of its functionality).

Basically what Cpanel and Plesk offer is the following:

• Email Account Manager and Webmail client
• Built-in File Manager
• Built-in Website Traffic Stats Software such as AWStats
• Addon and Subdomain Manager
• MySQL database manager with PHPMyAdmin web manager
• Apache Handler, Domain DNS editor (for MX record modifications)
• Other not really used

It is also good to know if you can enable or even request custom PHP extentions to be enabled/installed on your account as this seems to be a bit tricky and risky on the web hosting provider’s side (possible security implications). If you don’t need any then you shouldn’t care but if you want to run a Video type of site then you might need custom ones which are almost never included in the standard shared web hosting packages, so you should research a bit more before jumping into hosting before knowing what you really need from your hosting provider.

Website Speed

Basically the website speed is a relative thing since it depends on too many factors and can not be easily estimated, but you should atlest have a website that starts to load within 2-3 seconds and is fully loaded in a dozen. Note that the initial “start to show content” is what the actual main PHP/Server processing is involved as the rest is pretty much to download the images and other files associated are more dependent on your own internet connection rather than the capacity of the server. If you do have high speed DSL or even better (optic) connection then if the whole website does not load in 12-15 seconds than its most probably a slow server or network farm. Based on my own experience I find that the CPU (which determines the “start-to-load” speed) is most of the times overloaded easier than the Network Pipe (which determines the image/file load) as CMS systems tend to use vast amount of resources in peak times (when the page load request is processed). You should also consider that your package may be limited in those main resources and therefore load slower than other ones which makes your goal to find affordable good speed web hosting provider.

Hardware Reliability

We all know that cheap hardware is never reliable, so be advised if your cheap hosting provider seems to be a bit unreliable when something fails. A good hosting provider invests a fair amount in hardware and keeps the server up to date with regular 3-4-5 months scheduled downtime for hardware replacements. Based on my own experience I found that hard disks are the first thing to fail and they do fail quite often – approximately once a year (which at web server terms is often when you can have a server up and running for a whole year without a single system restart!! We have two of those and I’m really proud of them.). If possible you should try to get some information on scheduled maintenance early on when you signup or even in pre-sales. It is good if they have such in hand because this means that they are prepared to change stuff and won’t panic when something fails early. This is most evident with larger companies as they do their own data center warehousing compared to all small ones which pretty much lease servers from the large web hosting providers and resell it.

Now as conclusion – Reliable Web Hosting is better, but pricier

The primary share of the price you pay will always be for the support you get, the cheaper the hosting is the less support you should expect. Don’t think that for $3.95 a month any company will be able to provide you with top level tech support for the price of a Starbucks cup of coffee. A average technical support person should have atleast bachelor degree in Computer Science which pretty much rounds his price at around $25-$50 per hour labor and for $3.95 per month hosting don’t expect full day work. Again based on your own web mastering experience you should evaluate if you want to get better support or cheaper, just don’t expect miracles from less than $10 a month web hosting package. Don’t get me wrong, if you pay for Shared Hosting more than $20 a month for a single website hosting there is something weird in that and either you’re having really large and successful website (I do hope this is your case) or you’re just overpaying for something that you don’t really use. Note that I don’t include the support price in that, just for the server rent costs, as you can have some special support requests which are paid additionally.

I do hope this article explains how the hosting industry works and will help you find a good web hosting company that will make your web experience better. If you have any comments or questions, please feel free to comment here!

Venetsian Web Hosting reliable hosting, Web Hosting

The Perfect Link Bait

Since Link Building is a hard and complicated process, the best possible way is to invest your link building budget into Affiliate Marketing revenue share system. Sharing a fair percentage to affiliate marketers will outsource your link building efforts to them. The more revenue you share the more links you will get. The best of all is that you will be able to monopolize your products on all Search Engines as your own website will appear on the top search engine listings. Assuming you are selling products or services a 5% to 25%-30% (or based on the average affiliate revenue share percentage for your product/services niche). This can only be done if your invest a proper SEO affiliate marketing system.

In order to achieve maximum result, your affiliate marketing system should cover few basic requirements:

• To be built in or added as a plug-in to your current product content management system
• To allow individual product product and custom landing pages control.
• To offer various affiliate marketer statistical information and research tools as well as good ad-channeling system.
• To be SEO friendly.

The first three are apparent in most popular online shopping cart software but some of them are not really good in SEO. In order to have successful SE optimized product page you will have to add few lines of code which pretty much change the whole affiliate sales tracking process. This is something I red a while back and implemented myself few months ago, and now I find huge amount of good quality backlinks to my product pages. The whole thing that it does is that it redirects (301 Permanently Moved) any affiliate tracking link (ex: http://mywebstore/category/product?aff=affiliateid) to the plain product page URL without any tracking id (ex: http://mywebstore/category/product). but still tracking the affiliate referral with a php function call. Using this method you can prevent duplicate the duplicate content issue which is pretty common to the bad shopping cart software and in this way boost your search engine rankings as each affiliate link counts as relevant backlink.

The following code is part of my own affiliate tracking script:

affiliate-system-file.php

// records the IP address where the user comes from and the Affiliate Marketer who brought this user to our website
function AffiliateIn($user) {
        // if we don't have affiliate variable defined then this should not be tracked,
	if(!empty($user)){
		// This is user marketed by affiliate and we must record it to database
		/* Login to Database Server */
		mysql_connect("localhost","database_username","database_password") or die ('I cannot connect to the database because: ' . mysql_error());
		mysql_select_db("database_name");

		/* Insert the Tracking Code to Database */
		mysql_query("insert into `affiliate_tracking` (`ip`,`affiliate_id`) values ('".$_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']."','$user')");

		// redirect the user back to the original product page without tracking ID in order to prevent search engines from thinking this is duplicate content and to count this link appropriately.
		header ('HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently');
		header ('Location: http://mywebstore/category/product');
		die();
	}
}

function AffiliateOut($sale){
		/* Find if this sale is affiliate sale */
		$web_visitors=mysql_query("select `affiliate_id` from `affiliate_sales` where `ip`='".$_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']."'");
		if(mysql_num_rows($web_visitors)>0){
			$current_web_visitor=mysql_fetch_array($web_visitors);
			$affiliate=mysql_query("select * from `affiliate_users` where `id`='".$current_web_visitor["affiliate_id"]."' limit 1");
			mysql_query("insert into `affilaite_sales` (`affiliate`,`sale_id`,`sale_amount`) values (".$affiliate["id"].",".$sale["id"].",".($sale["value"]*affiliate["revenue_share_percentage"])."));
		} else {
			// THIS IS NOT AFFILIATE SALE
		}
}

product_or_landing_page.php (may be on all pages except checkout page)

// LOAD AFFILIATE TRACKING
require("affiliate-system-file.php");
AffiliateIn($_GET['aff']);

checkout.php (where the payment is completed/ after verified)

// LOAD AFFILIATE TRACKING
require("affiliate-system-file.php");
// Checks if this was affiliate sale and records it
AffiliateOut($sale);

NOTE: The script shown above is not complete. I’ve tried to show only the concept.

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During the last year I’ve been specializing in PHP Web Hosting administration and took a course in Advanced Web Security. This was partly due to the increasing threats from numerous hacker attacks on popular content management systems such as Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal, and others. In this post I will try to explain some of the major issues and hopefully help you strengthen your web hosting security (if you have your own VPS server or Dedicated Server since on Shared Web Hosting plans you don’t have permissions to edit the system configuration).

Due to various reasons php seems to be one of the most flexible web development platform, unfortunately being flexible sometimes leads to numerous security holes which can sometimes lead to a compromised websites. This is especially serious in popular website content management systems where “one” plugin or even the “CMS core” contains “insecure” code. In order to explain what insecure code is, I will list you some of the most popular types of “insecure” statement which most of the time eases data manipulation but it does more harm than good at the end.

• Register Global Variables = OFF – yes I know that global variables are very easy to work with, but this thing is so dangerous as all variables passed in a GET or POST calls to your scripts are auto-processed and if you don’t declare with null all your variables before you use them. To be safer you should use $_POST["variable"] or $_GET["variable"] since they don’t override all your variables. Note that they sill can be compromised and its a very good idea if you do some pattern matching prior to processing all input.

• Disable Dangerous PHP functions and never use them! Some of the most fatal security ones are dl,system,exec,passthru,shell_exec you can disable them from php.ini by editing the disable_functions value. In general those commands are not really used and should be avoided. Note that for example shell_exec is used by ImageMagic and you should not disable it if you use it. The best way to avoid such security issues is not to use those commands. We have found that EVAL for example is the most compromised function as it allows the execution of php code and if in combination with insecure global variable it can lead to a potentially destructive hacks.
• Remote URL injections using allow_url_fopen NOTE: if enabled, allow_url_fopen allows PHP’s file functions — such as file_get_contents() and the include and require statements — can retrieve data from remote locations, like an FTP or web site. . The problem is that this function is enabled by default in standard PHP configuration which means that you should disable it in order to prevent some of the serious PHP code exploits. Note that (from my experience) the actual Remote URL file inclusion is used in extremely rare cases which pretty much gives you the possibility to have this function disabled by default. From around 4,000 websites we had only 2 or 3 to use it.

It is sad to know that the list of possible php security issues are a big list and new ones are constantly added with each new version. That’s why it is our duty to try to keep our source code secure as possible (in my view as a professional php programmer) and keep the Apache/PHP configuration with lowest possible hazardous functions (in my view as a web hosting administrator).

I will post some more web hosting security issues later on, but I suppose those are the most fundamental issues which lead to about 90% of all hacker attacks. There are others which are hidden deep in the Apache code, and some more PHP functions that can be twisted in the wrong way to enable hacker access. I will list them in separate post.

If you want to add something else please feel free to post comments.

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As you may already know I‘m a big fan of the Domain Aftermarket and during the last few years I‘ve collected pretty good domain portfolio. Unfortunately not all domains are as good as they should be and this case is one of them.

Nearly six months ago I‘ve purchased the domain "usemortgages dot com" and I‘ve immediately developed DB Directory with some mortgage related stuff on it. A month later I‘ve noticed that all search engines are still trying to crawl non-existed/out-dated folders and they don‘t want to collect the new information. Google had very low crawling activity (within 1% of the total number content pages) and my site was not indexed on it (not showing any search results). I thought this was due to the large number of 404‘s (page not found) that was generated from the content switching, but this was not the case.

Eventually after more than 5 months of waiting I finally gave up and considered the domain as "blacklisted domain". This maent that I spent all that time for nothing

I‘m posting this not to scare you but to make you do your homework before purchasing or bidding on any aftermarket domain because you might stumble to such problem. The best possible way is to try to google it and if you find results from that domain then its not banned. Unfortunately this doesn‘t work with domains that did not have any content, but if they didn‘t have any content then most probably they were not banned. You can check if they had content from the archive.org internet archive as they contain pretty much good information on all domains.

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