And… Wordbay v1.7 is launched! If you are an existing owner, go and get it now from the Downloads page! Then come back here to find out what’s new in the awesome Wordbay eBay plugin for WordPress. Although they may not seem like much, there are some really awesome new features in this version, and it has undergone quite a big rewrite, hence the jump from 1.6.2 to 1.7. Here’s what’s new!

Multiple listings in a single post/page

Here’s what that looks like:

NEW Samsung Galaxy S II Galaxy S 2 GT-I9100 - 16GB - black Unlocked Smartphone

Current price:

$569.99

Ends in:

0d 0h 43m

Seller: eBay

Otterbox Defender Series Case Holster Rogers Samsung Galaxy S2 4G LTE Skyrocket

Current price:

$55.05

Type:

Auction

No. of bids so far:

1

Ends in:

0d 1h 13m

Seller: eBay

 

Or to put it another way, the WordPress Shortcode API has finally been implemented. That means you can now insert more than one listing unit in your page if you want, like I am about to do:

NEW HTC Desire Bravo A8181 3G GPS WiFi 1GHz Android SMARTPHONE

Current price:

$181.00

Type:

Auction

No. of bids so far:

21

Ends in:

0d 0h 59m

Seller: eBay

Original Flex Cable Ribbon Replacement For HTC Desire HD Inspire 4G G10 A9191

Current price:

$71.09

No. of bids so far:

0

Ends in:

0d 1h 11m

Seller: eBay

 

This gives you a much more natural look, instead of having a big block of listings, and really makes Wordbay a viable option for use in regular blogs. Just a few warnings: don’t go crazy with this, the more units you add, the more it will slow down your site whenever the listings need to be refreshed. Caching is a must. Also, you need to have different keywords for each unit, or they will display the same! The custom/meta post settings currently apply to ALL listings in that post/page. However, the Shortcode API DOES open up the way to implement individual settings for each unit, but you’ll have to wait on that a little .

ALSO NOTE: a side-effect of the Shortcode API is that you can no longer use a BLANK keyword to list ALL items from, say, a particular seller. Unfortunately the Shortcode API doesn’t support blank content between your tags, so you have to use a ‘*’ wildcard. I doubt many people have made heavy use of this, but if you have this will necessitate you going back to those posts/pages and manually editing them. Sorry, there was nothing I could do about this.

Option to suppress header and footer

Related to the previous new feature, you can now opt to turn off the header and footer of your listings unit, either globally or on individual pages (like I did above). This is particularly desirable on pages where you have more than one listings unit as you want a more “embedded” look, rather than showing a huge header, and the “These listings are refreshed every x minutes” text.

Make money from eBay without being a member of EPN!

Thanks to a chance conversation with someone on a forum I discovered that the Skimlinks and Viglink networks allow you to earn from EPN as a “second-tier” affiliate. This is major news for those who can’t get into EPN for whatever reason. I will write a separate post about this in the near future as this is a big deal, but in brief, you now have to choose which affiliate network to use under the eBay options: EPN, Skimlinks or None. EPN should be default, but check if you are an existing EPN user that the option has not got changed to something else!! The Skimlinks option requires a Skimlinks Publisher ID (you have to join Skimlinks of course), and Wordbay then builds a valid Skimlinks affiliate link to monetise your Wordbay clicks. You can also choose None – this can be for eBay sellers promoting their own listings who are not members of EPN, OR you can use this with the alternative Javascript option provided by Skimlinks and Viglink (for Viglink the Javascript is currently the only option) whereby Wordbay produces “vanilla” eBay links and then Skim/Vig converts them to affiliate links on-the-fly. I have tested all these options, they work great, and the clicks get registered with the service you are using. More about this later, but I am really pleased with this option because it opens up Wordbay for a great many new users.

New ‘fallback code’ for non-eBay countries

Got to thank Jez for this idea – he’s the same guy who wrote the geotargetting code way back when. He pointed out to me that (whether or not you are using geo-targetting) when people visiting your site from countries that do not have an eBay site (e.g. Russia) click on your eBay links, they are much less likely to buy anything from eBay.com, or whatever your default setting is. That is most likely going to negatively impact your EPN EPC. The new option allows you to show an alternate code to people from those countries. You do have to have geo-targetting activated to do this, then you just go to Display Settings, tick Show fallback content and ad the code you want to display to those visitors – Adsense is an obvious choice.

Now this could be complete coincidence, but the site I implemented this on, although it hasn’t really earned much from the Adsense shown to visitors to non-eBay countries (I wouldn’t expect it, it’s not that kind of niche really), it has seen a marked improvement in the average EPC, possibly as much as 50%. Early days yet, but all I can say is I wish I had looked into this before. Jez comes through again, thanks mate!

Big admin panel rewrite

Wordbay now has its own menu group in the left sidebar of the WordPress admin area and the panels are divided into logical (I hope) groups. That took a LOT more work than you think! You will figure it out easily enough. Just note that this involved an internal rejig of the way Wordbay’s parameters were stored. It’s JUST possible that this messes up your options in some way. I hope not, and I doubt it will because I have tested on my own blogs, but in the worst case scenario you can reset all the options by ticking the Reset option and quickly restore your options manually. The default options work fine anyway.

Template improvements

I generally tidied up the templates, and added some commenting to make it easier to make your own changes. Unfortunately the templates in this version are not backward compatible with previous versions. If you use, say, Default_red it just won’t display anything, you will get the “No listings” message. So I am afraid you will HAVE to change your regular template to Default_black (the only one now supplied) and do a comparison of the two templates to see what I changed. I DO plan on doing something about this soon, by making certain template options available in the backend – I have thought of a best-practice way to do that. Also, from now on I will try to do some kind of versioning on the site here showing what changes have been done to the templates, so you can easily make the changes yourself. Sorry, I know this is not ideal, but I am working on a better way.

There is also a new vertical widget template called “Justified” – I created it to blend in better with a site of mine and realised it looked a lot better than the current one, so you can give that a try too. It’s currently running here on the right sidebar (at least at time of writing!)

OK, enough info – all the other changes are detailed on the Downloads page in the changelog – let me know what you think, and of course hit me up on the Forum if anything goes wrong. If something seems to break DON’T PANIC, it’s extremely unlikely that anything can happen that will break your blog in any way. All errors I have encountered have been minor oversights that can easily be fixed.

Enjoy this awesome new version!!

These plugins would be an awesome opportunity for someone who has an online business already and wants to add some great pieces of software to their portfolio. These plugins could be used by site-builders to add massive value to their client sites, or perhaps as a premium upsell to an existing offer. Trust me, developing a serious WordPress plugin is no walk in the park – I have spent years developing my Wordbay plugin! Buying up rights from someone who has done the hard work makes sound business sense!

Whatever the business idea you might have, having these plugins in your stable ought to pay for itself quickly. I would love to have them myself, but I have  too much going on with my Wordbay plugin. I am passing the information on to you here – check out the sales page, and don’t forget they are only selling a limited number of these packages so don’t let the opportunity slip by.

For what it’s worth, none of the sites that matter to me have moved much – some I have done some backlinking on, some not, most are, I think, quality sites (though we all think that ), though I suppose I have done less “SEO” of one sort or another on them than most. Oh, and my main offline business site has NO shady backlinking at all and has moved up a place to #6 on page one, the first time ever it has been that high.

However, some older sites of mine, even those with decent content, but with perhaps a touch of keyword-stuffing, a smidgeon of ugly design and little content above the fold, and more than a smidgeon of poor quality backlinks HAVE disappeared off the face of the earth – so it will be interesting to follow the fate of those.

What do Google say?

The Google Webmaster blog post is as usual pretty circumspect and seems to considerably understate what appears to be a huge change, only vaguely mentioning “rewarding high-quality sites” and stating that the update is aimed at webspam (in their definition of the term, i.e. sites they feel shouldn’t be ranking where they are). The only specific problem areas Cutts talks about is “unusual linking patterns” and “keyword stuffing”, although interestingly he does mention “spun” content – is this the first time anyone from Google has referred to spun content in an official statement? I have a feeling it is… He even posts an example of such content, tying it in with “unusual linking patterns”.

Still, in true Google style the post really tells us nothing much of what this is all about. However, the general theme of webmaster reports on the changes does seem to lean towards the “over-optimised” SEO that Google have been talking about – probably referring both to excess on-page optimisation and obvious artificial backlinking.

However, there are as ever plenty of affected webmasters quick to state that they have not employed any of these tactics, that they have quality sites but that they have still been hit, etc. etc. It’s really impossible to say – of course every site owner is convinced that his or her site is the best around and does not deserve any penalty. On the other hand, with every algorithm update it is impossible to avoid affecting legitimate sites too.

Algorithmic strangeness

There are also some strange things going on, not least of which is completely empty sites appearing on page one – by the time you read this it may no longer be the case, but for a while a completely empty Blogspot blog was ranking no. 1 for the phrase “make money online”!

This alone tells us, I think, that this is far from the final state of affairs – these updates are often obviously partly experimental in nature and it is common for Google to roll out new updates subsequent to these major algo updates toning them down. I would definitely wait a few more days for the dust to settle.

Really all we can say is what we knew already: the game of cat and mouse between Google and SEOs goes on, there are bound to be casualties. Should Google be so powerful that they can literally wipe whole businesses off the map in a single day? That’s another matter. It’s proof again that we as site/business owners MUST have other traffic sources than Google, we simply cannot rely on a source so volatile as organic Google search. It does seem though that amongst all the mess, Google has succeeded in cleaning up page one for some results, though of course webmasters will heatedly debate this, especially if their sites were hit.

What about you, have you had any sites affected? Do you think you know why they were affected, or does it seem random?

I got sent this info the other day – it’s basically a QUALITY business proposition, one that I nevertheless can’t take up, so I am passing it on to you:

You may be familiar with DigiResults and their BIG-selling WordPress plugins: Digi Article Blaster, Digi Traffic Multiplier and WP Syndicator. These are plugins that have sold huge amounts and still are.

However, DigiResults is primarily an affiliate network, and they want to move away from the software business and commit to their core business. Quite wise, I think. So they have decided to sell up their plugin portfolio in the form of resell and rebranding rights for the premium plugins mentioned above.

This is a serious business proposition – they are selling a limited number of packages with resell and rebranding rights to Digi Article Blaster, Digi Traffic Multiplier and WP Syndicator. That would allow you as the buyer to is sell these plugins as your own product, under a different name etc. Like I say, this is a serious business opportunity, and the whole package with full resell rights will set you back around $2000, I think.

So this would really suit someone who already has a software or site development business – you could, for example, build sites that include one or more of these plugins, and charge a premium price. Or you could sell them at a low price as part of your front-end. Depends on your business model, of course, but if you have a serious Internet marketing business, you may well want to check the offer out, as you ought to be able to make back the initial outlay fairly quickly.

I am going to have to pass on this – I think it might distract me from development of Wordbay, but if you like the sound of owning resell and rebranding rights to some of the hottest-selling plugins of the last year or so, you ought to have a look at the offer.

What is white-hat SEO? My confession

What does that leave us with, then? Is there even such a thing as white-hat SEO? First let me say again, I am not pretending to be some purist, or white-hat evangelist – I would say what I do is grey-hat at best, and in the strict definition, black-hat like pretty much every other “ranking” tactic. But, just for the record, let me set out what my ranking methods have been up till now – these are the only methods I have knowingly used for backlinking, bearing in mind that Google doesn’t like it whatever anyone else thinks, so this still can’t be called white-hat. The expression I have come up with is victimless SEO (though of course that could just be a kind of self-justification):

Blog networks: yes, I have sent spun articles to blog networks for backlinks, and that is still a very effective SEO method, if you can stay under the new Google blog network radar. I am certainly concerned about Google’s crackdown on these and am looking to move away from this in the future (I know, that’s just what Google wanted). The reason I can sleep at night when I use these kinds of service is that all these blogs are OWNED by the owners/members of the network. I am not spamming random people’s blogs, I am using properties specifically maintained for that purpose. So it’s kind of victimless. But yes, that does still fill the web with crap (though I doubt many users of the Internet ever come across this stuff) and it is still about gaming the system. So I don’t necessarily feel great about it.

Article Marketing Robot “blasts”: hmm, OK, AMR is an awesome tool, and can still be very effective if used properly, though not as effective as it once was. I do still occasionally give low-competition keywords a “wee tickle” with Article Marketing Robot and it does seem to help. This is kind of spammy because many of the article sites it targets were not really created for publishing spun articles to, but most of them boil down to low-quality link/content farms nowadays. Quality article sites are now few and far between and cannot even be targeted with AMR due to their proprietary platforms, approval processes etc. But I figure if a site is auto-approve, or publishes my crappy spun article, then fair enough. I do think that is the most dubious of all my SEO tactics though, so I am thinking about that one…

Bookmarks: I can just about live with this, too, since bookmark sites are created for the purpose of bookmarking other sites. Many of them are pretty much abandoned, and very low-quality, too. It’s still a kind of spam (and bookmarks usually entail spun content), but again, more-or-less victimless, I guess!

“Authentic” backlink properties (on Web 2.0s, Wikis etc.): it is possible to create high-quality properties, such as on Squidoo, Wikispaces, Hubpages, etc. etc. etc. that are basically created for the purposes of a backlink, but do also add value to the site in question, and also possibly lend the backlink greater quality than if it was just a block of spun text. These are not spun nonsense, they have to be created manually, and carefully, but are worth more at the end, and give valuable content to the site owner too. Some of mine even rank for some minor terms. Sure, so Google still doesn’t like this, but otherwise it’s hard to call spam and provides value to the Internet rather than clogging it up with more spam.

Press releases: well, I figure if anyone wants to read or republish a press release about my little niche site about chrome bath taps, they will, if not, no biggie, no harm done.

On a side note, just by way of confession, I did once have “auto-approve” (AA) blog comments thrown at a site of mine, by a service provider who assured me their service was “white-hat”!! See the previous article for my thoughts on that! I was pretty mortified – plus it didn’t help much! And I am very careful about that now – I will not spam other people’s blog with comments.

But what I want to say by telling you all this is that even if, like me, you strive to be an ethical marketer, even to your own detriment (I could rank sites a lot more easily by using spammy tactics), it is still virtually impossible to call yourself a “white-hatter” in the true sense. At best, most of this stuff is “grey-hat”, and even then, if you take into account that any attempts to game the rankings is “black-hat” in Google’s book, then you still have to concede that calling yourself grey-hat is really only a weak kind of self-justification (“I am only HALF a murderer!” – yeah, not quite the same league, but you get my point).

Well, next time I will try to look at whether there really is such a thing as “true white-hat”.

But what do you think? Am I just kidding myself that my SEO tactics are “victimless”? Can you think of any other tactics that come under this category?

A new era of white-hat SEO?

From all the talk on the forums and blogs you would think a new era of white-hat SEO is at hand and that the creators of small niche sites are about to get shut down for good. It all started with Google hitting (and continuing to hit, seemingly) some of the big blog networks used by thousands of online marketers to artificially boost their site rankings, and continued with Google sending out huge numbers of messages via Webmaster Tools warning of “unnatural backlinking” to people’s sites and apparently penalising many – though that is still debated, many think that they are not penalising, it’s just those sites’ backlinks getting wiped out.

But it seems that most of all Google has achieved the aim of sending SEOs scurrying for cover, at least temporarily, giving the impression that wide-ranging and far-reaching changes are afoot and that a new era of white-hat webmastering is upon us. Certainly many SEOs, especially the less experienced, seem at a loss as to what to do next, now that their “favourite” link-building method (read, “only”) has apparently been shut down.

What’s the truth – are we all going to have to go white-hat?

White-hat vs. black hat

Well, first, what is white- and black-hat? Just before I start, so you don’t think I am going to get on some high horse here, I would say that what I do is “grey hat”, but that really there is no such thing, it’s either white or black. But there is still this strange confusion in the minds of online marketers concerning the distinction between black-hat SEO and white-hat SEO. It’s evident in the fact that if you go to a regular SEO forum, and then visit a so-called black-hat forum, you will see that 80% of the talk is on exactly the same tactics! Here is what most small-time and even some big-time SEOs are basically doing in terms of SEO, whether they are doing it themselves, or hiring service providers (usually via cheap forum services like on Black-Hat World, Traffic Planet or Warrior Forum – many of them are the same service providers, actually!):

1. Create a site around a limited selection of keywords which they have chosen with Market Samurai, Keyword Scout etc.
2. Whack up 3 articles at 350 words (of very boring text) + privacy policy + contact page
3. Start throwing cheap links at the site (though nothing too spammy, people got stung with that a while back, so they got more careful) – blog network links from spun articles, spun web 2.0 articles, maybe some Wiki articles (also spun), maybe some social bookmarks (usually automated, and on very low-quality bookmarking sites).
4. If the keyword/s is/are a bit more competitive, start building tiers, throwing blog comments, bookmarks, forum profile links at the pages that were built in step 3.

And that IS pretty much it. And to be honest, that approach has been working for quite a while, and to my knowledge still is to a large extent. But what makes me laugh is that a very large number of site owners would call this a white-hat, or at least grey-hat approach! And no-one is calling them out on it, so evidently there is basically tacit approval of all this in the SEO community!

What is black-hat SEO?

Let me break it to you guys, the above strategy is black-hat. It’s just that maybe your definition of black-hat is different to mine. And that’s the problem here, it’s how you define it – there are only three ways to really define something as being black-hat:

1. It’s downright illegal (hacking, email spamming etc. – that’s obvious)
2. It infringes someone’s Terms of Service
3. It goes against your personal ethical code

However, MOST of the tactics above are not just against MY ethical code, they are also black-hat in terms of no. 2 – it’s just most SEOs prefer not to think about that. So let me help:

Web 2.0 articles – usually SPAM as they are usually automated, spun content, created solely for the purpose of a backlink, and this is generally against the TOS of the site in question, and spam by most definitions, and not entirely victimless as it can really do damage to legitimate sites if not controlled.

Wiki backlinks – ditto, even though many of those Wiki sites are basically abandoned ghost sites, still, it’s spamming someone else’s property

Forum profiles – this is SPAM! Have you ever owned a forum? I have, several, and this practice (thankfully losing popularity lately) is absolutely infuriating – people using automated software to register fake users by the hundreds, like anna14637, just so they can drop their site backlink in the user’s profile. I used to spend WAY too much time deleting these profiles (before I got clever). If you doubt this is spam in any way, well, you have probably never owned a forum and have no right to vote on the matter!

Blog comments – are you kidding?! Apart from email spam, there is nothing quite so despicable as blog comment spam, which people do with ridiculous spun text (yeah, it’s usually good for a laugh, I suppose), using automated tools again which shall remain nameless. These are the absolute bane of any owner of a serious blog. Thank God for Akismet is all I can say, otherwise I would probably have taken the law into my own hands by now! Yet Internet marketers are routinely ordering services that include blog commenting (i.e.spamming) as part of their “strategy” (usually second- or third-tier backlinking). All I can conclude is that greed and the prospect of ranking lucrative keywords serves to switch off any ethical obstacles that people have in their minds…

So although black-hat can be somewhat hazy to define, my opinion is that most SEOs, at least at the lower end of the scale, are basically engaged in black-hat and usually SPAM too.

Even if you disagree with some or all of this, then you still have to concede that Google considers any form of manipulation of the SERPS to be against their TOS (i.e. black-hat). So most of us are black-hatters, let’s face it.

OK, this post is getting long, so let’s leave the discussion of white-hat and how we define it for next time! In particular I will talk about some of the strategies I have personally used and you will see I am certainly not a saint when it comes to backlinking, though I am working on changing my wayward behaviour!

What about you, what are your feelings about black-hat vs. white-hat? Would you consider that what you do is ethical/white-hat SEO? Do you even care, if it gets results?

OK, every now and then one of these clever new programs is launched that promises thundering torrents of server-breaking traffic to your website (or words to that effect) – and one of those is Linkbrander, just launched. I thought I would write a kind of review of Linkbrander – though it’s not so much a review as an attempt to make head or tail of this new service, because first impressions are rather confusing.

Any links in this review of Linkbrander, affiliate or otherwise have been removed as I have too many doubts about Linkbrander. But I will try to explain to you how the service actually works, and you can decide for yourself.

Linkbrander – first impressions, confusion!

I have rarely come across a big IM product launch that is as darned confusing as Linkbrander! Even after I watched the video on the sales page I was still none the wiser really. There seem to be two aspects to Linkbrander – one is a URL-shortening service, which they try to sell you on by explaining how common affiliate link hijacking is and how shortening your URLs with their service can protect you from that.

The other selling point is some kind of traffic exchange/credit system which I really couldn’t make head nor tail of! I just had memories of BlogRush – a startup that tried to do something similar three or four years ago, amid massive publicity, and was a disastrous failure! Linkbrander includes some kind of downline referral system too, so you can supposedly get incremental traffic just by referring lots of people, and it goes as deep as 10 levels! Of course, via some simple multiplication, they are able to produce astronomical figures for the amounts of traffic you could theoretically get. I must point out that none of these schemes have ever quite worked out like that!

But, like I was, you are probably a bit in the dark about how Linkbrander actually works. Well, I took the plunge and signed up – as the basic service is supposed to be FREE.

Linkbrander – one-time-offer

Well, if you have been in IM any length of time, you will know there is no such thing as free really! They must be planning to make money out of this somehow! Sure enough, after you sign up with your email address (single opt-in, it seems to me – tut, tut, tut) you are hit with the “one-time-offer” – a recurring Platinum membership option whereby you pay ($9 monthly) to avoid needing to collect credits by getting a certain number of impressions of your ad monthly. What ad? Well, I am getting ahead of myself, it’s coming.

Linkbrander – downsell

If you skip the OTO, then you get hit with the downsell, which is a $1 trial of the Platinum service, as far as I can see. I suppose that might be worth trying, as long as you CANCEL if you see that you are not getting the results you want.

Linkbrander – how does it work?

Well, even after navigating the up- and down-sells and hitting the back end, I was still rather bemused. Basically there are two panels, that look like this:

Hope you can see that properly. You have two panels, one titled Create a new link, where you create your “shortened” links (actually, they are not very short!) and the other that says Your Link Brander [sic] Ads. Clear now? I didn’t think so! The video on the backend helps a little, but still seems rather rushed, and seems rather to assume that you have understood the whole Linkbrander concept!

So I am going to put you out of your misery finally, and explain how it actually works!

The point is, whenever you link out to an external site, whether its an affiliate link or just a regular link, you are supposed to create a Linkbrander link with their “shortener”. Why? Because when someone clicks on that link on your site, they are going to get funneled through Linkbrander’s, er, funnel! And that funnel consists of LB opening the target page, but adding a one-line frame at the top of the page with a textual ad on it. That textual ad will be advertising some service or product of another user of Linkbrander, and your visitor might or might not click on it. If they do click (and I believe only if they click) then you get extra credits for your own ads. And that is what the second panel is about – you create your own textual ads, linking to your product, offer, whatever, and it gets shown on the network a certain number of times depending on how many credits you have earned.

NOW does it make a bit of sense?! So this scheme basically depends on you having a) some traffic of your own, whether a list, or site visitors, whom you can send through a shortened Linkbrander link and hopefully earn credits when they click on someone else’s offer and b) an offer of your own that you want to promote through the network.

Thoughts on Linkbrander

There’s always something alluring about the promise of free traffic. Thing is, you have to remember that it also depends on you having some traffic to give. So why not just keep all your traffic to yourself in the first place, to promote your own offers? Well, you could argue that not all visitors to your site are necessarily interested in your product, but they might be interested in someone else’s offer, so they might at least earn you some credits to promote your own offer to someone else’s traffic. But that begs the question how they are going to get niche differentiation – if I send traffic from my IM blog and my referrals get served weight loss ads, what kind of conversions am I going to see?! However, I have a sneaky feeling that the emphasis is going to be on the IM niche in any case…

I suppose Linkbrander differs somewhat from TrafficSwarm (a service that gives credits for viewing other people’s offers and in my opinion provides utterly worthless traffic 99% of the time) – at least here you could say that you are potentially getting your product out before new people you wouldn’t otherwise have had access too – incidental visitors to other people’s sites.

I don’t like the way they emphasise using their shortening service to shorten your affiliate links, by using link-jacking as a scare tactic! I mean, what if they are out to steal my affiliate commissions in the same way – bit ironic, don’t you think! I understand, they need to somehow sell you on using their redirect service so they can get you on board the scheme, but it seems a little clumsy!

Ultimately though, like any service of its kind, the proof will be in the pudding – is this service actually going to get you new, fresh traffic to your offer? These kinds of scheme tend to depend on a very fine balancing act between the number of clicks/quantity of traffic available in the system and the number of potential buyers. The temptation on the part of the owners of such systems is to try to increase the amount of traffic by artificial means, and to boost participation by giving away credits, which ultimately usually backfires and leads to hyperinflation of the credit system and its complete demise!

Well, I have really sold you on this, some Linkbrander review, huh!? I am not saying it won’t work - try Linkbrander, at least the free service, and let me know – just remember, whether you get the traffic and sales you expected is where it will sink or swim – even torrents of traffic aren’t enough, it’s got to be converting traffic. I have seen these schemes come and go – perhaps Linkbrander will be different. Honestly, I am going to take some convincing!

P.S. And now, with those spammy promotional emails I am even more doubtful this is anything other than another churn-and-burn IM product whose ultimate beneficiaries are its owners, and no-one else. Sign up at your own risk.

P.P.S. Oops, this “review” now ranks no 1 in Google for “Linkbrander review” – perhaps I’d better add the words “scam” and “legit” and seal the deal. I guess maybe I just lost some friends round these parts.

I’ll come straight out and say it – I am an Android guy, I have a number of problems with Apple products, but let’s not get into that here. The point is I am a heavy user of my smartphone, which at the moment is the awesome Samsung Galaxy S2.

Samsung Galaxy S II Epic 4G Touch SPH-D710 - 16GB - Vortex Black (Sprint)...

Current price:

$265.00

Type:

Auction

No. of bids so far:

45

Ends in:

0d 0h 31m

Seller: eBay

Samsung Galaxy S II SGH-I777 - 16GB - Black (AT&T) Smartphone

Current price:

$306.00

Type:

Auction

No. of bids so far:

2

Ends in:

0d 0h 35m

Seller: eBay

 

And there are a few free apps I use very frequently which are great for Internet marketers – actually, I think it would be fair to say they are mostly SEO-orientated. I thought I’d run them by you.

AdSense Dashboard by Gregory Block

This app is for if you are an Adsense junkie and a stats junkie too (guilty of both). It pulls your Adsense stats for the day/week etc. from your Adsense account so you can keep an eye on them wherever you are, and the thing I really like is the homepage widget, which gives a rotating display of your CTR, clicks and revenue for the day (yeah, the picture was taken in the morning, right after the stats reset for the day, that’s why you can’t see my massive treble-figure earnings, ha ha). Handy for keeping a minute-by-minute eye on your Adsense earnings. In the backend you get a daily overview, a 7-day overview by channel, a graphical display of revenue, CPC and CTR and day-by-day totals for the last 2 weeks.

On the downside, it can be a bit sluggish updating the widget, and I would also like to be able to see a daily report by custom channel – currently you can only get a rolling by-channel report for the last 7 days, so you can’t actually see which site has brought you clicks that day. Still, a great free app, and there is no premium upgrade that I know of.

gAnalytics Google Analytics App by e6bapps

This is fairly self-explanatory too – an app which pretty much replicates the whole of your Analytics account on your Android device, with Traffic, Visitors, Content, Goals etc. All in all pretty much a “does-what-it-says” app, but I would like to see some graphical displays – there are a very few, but only in some of the sub-categories for some reason. Also I don’t see Adsense data for sites where I have tied Adsense to Analytics – it would be good to see which pages are actually earning me money while I am out and about!

I am also going to take a look at GAnalytics Widget by Jiří Procházka fairly soon – that seems to be a lot newer and is still a beta evidently, but it does seem to have a lot more in the way of graphics, which is something that really helps me personally visualise data, and probably most other people. It does only appear to be optimised for Samsung Galaxy at the moment though.

SEO SERP Tracker by TheDroidProject

The third app I use on a regular basis is another one for the stats-freaks: its name is pretty self-explanatory again. This is a smartphone app for tracking your search engine rankings. You enter the site address, then the keywords you are tracking, and every time you click Find Rankings it will update with the latest rankings. You can set up up to 3 sites with 7 keywords each on a single Google country site in the lite (free) version, and all these limitations are removed in the premium version. The free version is also ad-supported, and the ad seems to suspiciously appear above the site selection dropdown just as you are about to press it – I have pressed the ad accidentally a number of times – hmm…

The most important thing with these programs is accuracy – apparent rankings can be affected by all kinds of things such as by browser cookies and geographic location of your IP address (ever thought you were ranking on page one for something, only to be sorely disappointed! We’ve all been there!) Well, this seems to be pretty accurate on the whole, give or take a few places, and is certainly handy for quickly checking those rankings first thing in the morning (in bed ). And the premium version won’t break the bank.

Wishlist

My Internet marketing Android app wishlist only really has one other item on it and that is a decent keyword research tool for smartphones. There does appear to be one out there: SEOCockpit but that seems to sell you straight onto a recurring monthly payment, and is not exactly getting rave reviews. It would be awesome to be able to access the Google Adwords Keyword Tool on my Android and do quick lookups for search volume etc. while I am out-and-about – often that’s when I get those great niche ideas! Currently all smartphone browsers seem to have trouble running the web version of the KWT, it’s probably just too complex. Correct me if I am wrong about that though!

Are there any more Android apps for Internet marketing that I have missed here? Let me know!

What is Skimlinks?

Skimlinks is a company based in the UK and fairly new – founded in around 2008, but only really gathering some momentum in the last year or two, and gaining particular publicity thanks to their relationship with Pinterest (which appears to have ended now, but don’t quote me on that).

Basically, Skimlinks is a kind of super-affiliate network. It has relationships with, according to their currently-published figures, 33 affiliate networks – which would mean most of the major ones – and therefore indirectly with over 18,000 online merchants. With many of these affiliate networks they have a top-tier or ‘preferred partner’ relationship, which means they get top-level commission rates that would not be accessible to most of us mere mortals, and as a consequence they can pass on a high rate of commission to you, the user, often the same rate of commission you would have received if you had gone through the relevant affiliate program directly.

How does Skimlinks work?

As a user of Skimlinks you get to leverage this massive base of affiliate programs by referring your product-related traffic through their service – Skimlinks automatically turns any links to online merchant into affiliate links. You are then paid for all these earnings from different affiliate programs by Skimlinks directly, once the earnings have cleared with the relevant affiliate program.

These “Skimlinks” are created in several ways – for most users the simplest way is by inserting a little Javascript snippet from Skimlinks into their website (the site should previously be approved by Skimlinks – see later). This Javascript will then turn any merchant-related links into affiliate links on-the-fly and credit you for any sales. For example, if it comes across a plain link to Amazon.com on your site, it will automatically turn it into an affiliate link!

There is an additional optional service called Skimwords which scans your content for product-related keywords and automatically converts them into Skimlinks, with a little price comparison popup too, similar to Kontera, Infolinks, Chitika etc. This option is stated by the company to be  more effective in certain niches than others (consumer electronics & tech, fashion & beauty, automotive, mothering and lifestyle) and I haven’t yet been able to test Skimwords on a site in any of those niches as I do not really have anything going on in them. I can confirm that on a sports-related site I am testing Skimlinks on I have not yet seen any Skimwords coming up, but I will keep you posted if I manage to test that further. In any case it seems like a nice potential boost to your earnings, provided you are sure that this feature will not annoy visitors.

Why would you use Skimlinks?

Of course, you might be asking why you would bother using Skimlinks! I mean, you can just create affiliate links by yourself, right? And why go through another network and risk possibly having to share a small amount of your commission with the network?

Well, these are the advantages of Skimlinks as I see them:

• you get to access a TON of affiliate networks that you aren’t a member of – including eBay, which is much sought-after and notoriously hard to get into! And you will soon be able to promote eBay via Skimlinks with my Wordbay plugin
• Skimlinks takes all the drudgery out of creating affiliate links. With most networks it is a real hassle creating links – you need to log in, find the code, find the product, etc. etc. etc. With Skimlinks you literally just link to the product page you want and Skimlinks does the rest!
• you get link cloaking of sorts, since you are only posting plain links in your content, not affiliate links, which are only converted to affiliate links by the Javascript – so there could be a small advantage there too.
• you get paid by one single network instead of having to wait for earnings to accrue from dozens of different ones.
• if you have a site that already has tons of content on it, especially user-created, you can convert ALL those links to affiliate links overnight, just by installing the Skimlinks code! And it will not forcibly “affiliatise” links that are already affiliate links.

Downsides to Skimlinks

A review of Skimlinks wouldn’t be a review without pointing out some disadvantages:

• you do still need to get accepted into Skimlinks, so you do need to have a half-decent site (see below). But then, if you haven’t got a half-decent site there is no point applying anyway! Really – get some traffic going and then worry about what affiliate program to join!
• Javascript is used to convert the affiliate links (unless your site uses the API, like Wordbay does ), so there is a possibility that people browsing your site have JS turned off and therefore the links will not get converted. But honestly, is there anyone seriously surfing without JS these days?! It must be a very small percentage.
• yes, Skimlinks probably will take some of your commissions – not all their partnerships are “preferred” partnerships, so you may end up losing out on a little of your commissions to the middle man. But the huge flexibility and increased referrals potential ought to more than make up for that.
• Skimlinks is of kind of questionable value to merchants because why pay commissions to affiliates, when sites were linking to you anyway with vanilla links?! Sure, and that is a little controversial in the case of, say, Pinterest, since users were linking out to merchants anyway, and Pinterest was just “hijacking” their links with Skimlinks and getting the commission, which the merchant wouldn’t otherwise have had to pay! Well we’ll leave that between the individuals involved – presumably merchants still get more value from working with Skimlinks than not working with Skimlinks, and this isn’t an ethical issue for most affiliate marketers, as we are monetising content that we specifically created to be monetised.

All in all, though there are downsides, it costs nothing to at least try Skimlinks and see whether your bottom line benefits overall!

How to join Skimlinks

Just go to their site here and go through the simple sign-up process. You WILL need to initially submit a site of yours that you intend to monetise with Skimlinks/Skimwords. It is good to add a word or two about what your model is – be open and conversational, some Internet marketers just seem to lack basic communication skills and come across as incredibly terse and awkward! Just say how and what you want to promote and how you are going to make Skimlinks and yourself money! Simple as that, just communicate!!

Any additional sites you want to use Skimlinks on will need to be added and approved as and when, but in my experience this takes less than 24 hours. Support is also very quick, I have received responses within a few hours (during UK working hours) when I have had queries.

The back-end includes all the necessary installation instructions, including WordPress plugins that make the job easy as pie.

My thoughts on Skimlinks

To end this review – I really like the way Skimlinks works, it’s got huge potential for certain types of site, and I would seriously consider putting all my affiliate traffic on certain sites through Skimlinks. If I had some massive existing forum I would definitely be putting it on my there!

I have mostly tested the eBay tracking so far and it all seems to be working fine, and I am getting a reasonable EPC which is comparable to what I would get through EPN too. I still have to test some affiliate sales through other programs like Amazon (hey, what do you think I do, magic affiliate sales out of thin air?!), but there is no reason to think it will not work fine. I notice that the reporting lags by about 3 days, but that is probably to be expected, and may be due to recent delays in eBay posting their sales stats. eBay tend to post the day’s click/EPC data about 10-12 hours after midnight for the previous day, so by the time that trickles down through Skimlinks’ reporting you are looking at several days, with no delays. Maybe not ideal, but not the end of the world.

I am personally especially excited about Skimlinks for the opportunity it is going to bring, in combination with my Wordbay plugin (v1.7 coming soon, with Skimlinks support!) for people who are unable to get into the eBay Partner Network for whatever reason, to be able to earn money from eBay referrals just like they would if they were in EPN. And Skimlinks, unlike Viglink (a similar service in many ways) does NOT require any special approval for you to be able to promote eBay! However, the new version will support Viglink too, if you want to use that.

Skimlinks referrals

Oh, and you can refer other users to Skimlinks and earn a small percentage of Skimlinks’ cut of the commissions for the next year – I doubt it’s going to make you rich, but it’s a nice bonus. So of course I would be very grateful if you signed up with my affiliate link, especially if you are already earning gazillions via affiliate marketing . It will not cost you anything and you know us affiliate marketers. Always looking for a few extra pennies to feed our hungry families

To end with, let me remind you again to look out for the new Wordbay 1.7 with Skimlinks support – coming soon! Sign up to my RSS feed (right sidebar) if you want to be sure not to miss the announcement!

Whether you are using Google Analytics, or some other stats program, you probably like to see what search terms are bringing people to your site. In fact for many of us, a good portion of our bread and butter is dependent on people visiting our site/s looking for specific keywords.

Well, in the last couple of months I have being seeing, apart from the terms “insurance”, “make money online, “get ex back” etc. (I am joking. Or AM I…?!) more and more incidence of the keyword string “&esrc=s” appearing in the list of referring keywords. Being busy as I am, I hadn’t had time to look into what that was, I just assumed it was spam pinging of some sort or another. If you are using a PHP-based (server-side) stats program like the awesome Tracewatch (it’s free, I’ve been using it for years on my lowish-volume sites), or something like AWStats, maybe you have seen ”&esrc=s” cropping up a lot, and wondered what that’s all about.

&esrc=s – another blow to SEO?

Well, the truth may surprise you, because those strings aren’t spam, they are actually coming from Google. After their recent not-so-subtle declaration of war on blog networks (you do know about the whole BMR deindexing episode?) it seems that they are stealthily implementing another weapon against the SEO community.

It is all to do with an announcement Google made back in October 2011 that they were going to start SSL-encrypting the search engine for users who are logged into Google. Now, ostensibly, what that means is, if you are logged into the mighty G, all your activity on the search engine will be encrypted and therefore basically impossible to snoop (oh, except by Google, one would imagine).

But for us this means, more importantly, that when such an “encrypted” user clicks through a search result to our site, the exact search term they used will no longer be displayed. In other words (techie explanation coming up! Skip as required!), the q parameter from the referral string is simply missing! And because it is followed by &esrc=s, that throws a lot of stats programs into thinking that the search string was “q=&esrc=s“, because those programs never imagined they would get fed a referral url with an empty ‘q’ parameter. Geddit!

And that is what this &esrc=s is – it indicates that a user came from Google, but it does not tell us what they were searching for. If you are using Analytics this simply shows up as “(not provided)”.

What’s it really about?

That could make it increasingly tricky to focus our SEO efforts, wouldn’t you say? And that would be every bit in Google’s interest, I am sure you will agree. Google say that this move comes as part of an effort to “increase the privacy and security of your web searches”, but you may be interested to know that search strings resulting from clicks on Adwords ads in the search results will not be encrypted, since people paying for clicks have a right to that data, dontcha know? Oh, wait, so privacy’s not really that big a deal then? Well, make of that what you will, but I want to focus on the upshot of this for SEO people.

This move basically means that as they roll this out and as more and more people use Google through SSL, there will be less and less information available to non-Adwords-click-paying webmasters about the specific search terms that are bringing people to their sites. So it will be very hard to work on ranking specific keywords when we do not really know how much search traffic they are bringing us. Whatever next! Google limiting the data available on search volume in the Keyword Tool…?!  Doesn’t bear thinking about…

The figures

Now, you may know all this, but I thought I would pull some specific figures out for some of my sites so you can see the (increasing) impact of “&esrc=s“, because that may be something you haven’t yet appreciated. Below are figures for three sites and I will give you the general niche of each site and the percentage of incoming Google searches which are “&esrc=s” (encrypted) search clickthroughs for Jan, Feb and March so far:

Site 1: sportswear niche

Jan: 10%

Feb: 13%

Mar: 16%

Site 2: home improvement niche

Jan: 1%

Feb: 1%

Mar: 7%

Site 3: this site (basically IM niche)

Jan: 30%

Feb: 30%

Mar: 30%

Update: Now added April 2012 – get this!

Apr: 52%

Yes, the first two sites have shown a definite increase in these encrypted Google referrals, and for the last site (thewordbay.com) I have absolutely no idea what a full 30% 52% of Google visitors were searching for when they came here, a drastic increase in April, after I wrote the initial article! If you are wondering why it’s so much higher than those other sites, the answer is obvious: this site is frequented by far more Internet-savvy people, and as a consequence proportionally far more people are logged into Google when they are searching for things relating to Internet marketing etc., and so far more are doing SSL-enabled searching.

If you are involved in SEO, you can probably see where this is going. It seems that Google is sneaking up on us with this, and I bet a good majority still know nothing about this “&esrc=s” issue. Are we seeing another attempt by Google to bring order to its SERPS by stifling the efforts of SEOs to optimise for specific keywords? What if Google stopped sending keyword information tomorrow (unless you are prepared to pay for search traffic)? What is plan B?

I suspect this one is “to be continued…”