How I Got Rich

Is Cloaking Affiliate Links to Amazon Illegal?

I just read a scary post on this blog about a guy who got his Amazon associates account (and his Adsense account) banned. The reason for the Amazon ban seems to be because he was cloaking his affiliate links which is against their new TOS. Anyone else heard of this?

“In addition, you must not use a link shortening service in a manner that makes it unclear that you are linking to an Amazon Site.”

Taken from: http://www.aaronchua.com/2012/02/banned-from-amazon-and-adsense.html

Google Panda Update 3.3 – Google’s Changing Backlinks

This latest email from Rappin Matt of Matt’s Marketing Club might be of interest to some of you and it sounds like it’s the death-knell of back linking as we know it:

Well, looks like Google is getting ready to roll out Panda version 3.3. You can take a look for yourself at the 40 updates Google is making to search here:

http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2012/02/search-quality-highlights-40-changes.html

Basically, if you go through the changes, you’ll notice that Google is mostly tweaking things that help the placement of their own content.

“Improvements to travel-related searches.”

(When you search for stuff related to travel in Google, you’ll notice they give top billing to their own service, even above the paid ads! Coincidence?)

“International launch of shopping rich snippets.”

(Translation: Google Shopping will now be featured above organic results on a world wide scale.)

“Expand the size of our images index in Universal Search.”

(The Google Images placements will be a lot more intrusive.)

Anyway, the list goes on and on. But the biggest news that should conscern us SEO people who rely on search engine traffic is this:

Link evaluation. We often use characteristics of links to help us figure out the topic of a linked page. We have changed the way in which we evaluate links; in particular, we are turning off a method of link analysis that we used for several years. We often rearchitect or turn off parts of our scoring in order to keep our system maintainable, clean and understandable.

This comment has set the SEO community abuzz over what change Google is making to backlinking, since backlinks are pretty much the lifeblood of SEO.

My own personal theory – Google is going to be removing the “Pagerank” factor from it’s backlink evaluation.

I don’t have any proof to back this up, but that’s my gut feeling.

Why do I feel this way?

Well, dealing with Google’s Quality Score with my own websites, it seems to me like their “Quality” algorithm is far better in finding the kind of sites Google likes than it’s PageRank algorithm.

After all, Panda is all about finding “Quality” websites.

So it just makes sense that Quality Score will replace PageRank when it comes to determining how valuable a backlink is.

In short – a backlink from a website Google deems High Quality will carry much more weight than a website with a high “Page Rank.”

Couple this with the fact that Google has slowly been weeding out it’s Pagerank tracker from its services – like the Google Toolbar – and you can see why I think this is the link evaluation factor that’s on the chopping block.

This is why it is SO IMPORTANT to learn about Google’s Quality score and how it evaluates websites. Backlinking is about to get a whole lot more complicated.

To your success,

Matt

P.S. If you want to repost this article, feel free to. Just be sure to toss a backlink to the group at:

http://groups.google.com/group/matts-marketing-club

Good old Google! Time to start work on the community site you’ve had on your ‘to do’ list for the last few years…

Google Panda hits the UK

Well it looks like in the last few days the latest Google Panda/Farmer update has been rolled out to the UK.

I think the main point of the update has been to downgrade sites with low quality/non-unique content.

Site with backlinks from sites that have low quality content may also have been hit as those links get discounted.

So how have your sites fared? Mine seem to be ok so far as far as I can tell.

• http://blog.searchmetrics.com/us/2011/04/12/googles-panda-update-rolls-out-to-uk/

From the Blogs

I’ve been reading a lot more blogs in order to find out about what else I could be doing to increase my earnings.

To be honest, most of them are either people bragging about how much they are making, people who haven’t made it yet and those who are just promoting the affiliate marketing lifestyle and the tools you could use to make it (and get their cut of the affiliate commission for those tools).

Update: here is another one that has a couple of good tips about promoting amazon products: http://www.makemoneyontheinternet.com/make-money-with-amazon/
Again, its a bit vague but might spur you on to do more.

Here are a couple of interesting blog posts I found. Beware they are promoting products but there might be some worth in there:

How to dominate a niche and earn $10,000 per month from one niche site. I’m not saying this guy is lying but I can’t get my brain to accept this is possible, especially when I look at my sites and what I am earning! But the post has a lot of text and he is doing things differently than me with his niche sites so there might be something in it. Bascially he says totally dominate your niche before moving on (and how to do it). Its all a bit vague but it seems like a good idea although I can’t believe those figures. What niche could make $10,000 a month? Is it possible and I’m just aiming too low or is $1000 site more realistic per month? Anyways, here is the link:

• http://www.makingmoneyontheinternetfree.info/niche-domination

As you may know I’ve been doing some article marketing lately so this post caught my eye. The guy is doing a 30 day test to see if he can rank a site only using article backlinks gained from using the Unique Article Wizard tool which submits and spins you articles for you. He’s even listed the site so you can see an example of the kind of niche site he is hoping to rank. Should be an interesting read if you are into article marketing.

• http://alexwhalley.com/uniquearticlewizardreview/ultimate-articlemarketing-challenge/

Read any good blog posts recent? If so leave me a comment.

Oh, and if you want to do me a favour please sign up for the free backlinking service at Social Monkee as I will get an upgrade if 10 more people sign up: http://www.socialmonkee.com/index.php?af=20612

Cheers!

Affiliate Doctors launch Affiliate Chatroom

Just in case you don’t read the affiliate doctors blog here is the link to their new chatroom: http://www.affiliatedoctors.com/the-affiliate-chatroom-launch/

I’m in there as Joe3000, see you there!

Countdown to Going Full-Time (Again)

Things are getting real: countdown to giving up the day job!

Due to a change in personal circumstances I will be becoming a full-time affiliate again in about eight months (July 2011).

I gave this a crack before about a year ago but didn’t use my time wisely enough to increase my profits so didn’t earn enough to keep at it and therefore had to go back to work.

I was gutted to return to work and give up the dream life of working for myself with no boss or alarm clock but hopefully I learnt something from snatching defeat from the jaws of victory and next time things will be different.

But for now at least my main focus is to increase earnings over the next eight or so months.

Ideally I want to be bringing home ₤2000 a month by July 2011 but that would mean an increase of about 66% and that sounds like an awful lot!

In theory it only needs 10 of my numerous sites to bring in ₤200 each a month but hardly any of my sites make over ₤50 a month so this too seems like a long shot.

Perhaps eight months is enough time to build a site that will bring in ₤1500 (with the other ₤500 coming from my existing sites) but so far I’ve not even come slightly close to that.

By the end of this month (November) I will have picked a strategy for how to proceed over the next eight months to realise my goal and be a successful (this time) full-time affiliate marketeer.

Big Drops in the SERPS for my Sites

I thought I’d survived my recent Google AdWords banning quite well but after having a look at how my sites are ranking in Google using the Advanced Web Rankings tool I was a little surprised to see that a sizeable percentage of my sites had dropped right out of the Google Search Results Pages (SERPS) for some of their keywords.

My main sites don’t seem to be affected (yet), at least not for their main keywords, but some of my less profitable sites have either dropped right down or fallen off the radar completely.

There are a few reasons I can guess at that might have caused this:

• If Google thinks my sites aren’t good enough for AdWords then they aren’t good enough for the organic search so has penalised my sites there too.
  Likely-hood: probable but the sites that have dropped aren’t all sites I was promoting with AdWords although they are on the same shared hosting package.
• I’ve been buying a lot of forum profile back links and blog commenting back links lately.  
  Likely-hood: again quite likely as these links are pretty weak in terms of quality and most of the sites I got them for had no links before hand and now suddenly have 100 links – although most don’t seem to be indexed.
• I’ve only recently started monitoring my sites in the SERPS since getting the ranking tool.  With the tool I can check how my sites are ranking for lots of keywords and get updates every day.  Perhaps beforehand my sites were jumping around a lot and I never noticed.
• Likely-hood: not too high but fingers crossed this is the reason and it was going on all along.

So how are you sites doing?  Has there been a Google update?

Lets hope it doesn’t spread to my more profitable sites!

Spots #1 and #2 in Google!

As you may have read I recently got a copy of Advanced Web Ranking which is a software application that checks where your sites are in the search engines for keywords of your choice. Since installing it I’ve been hooked on checking my sites for various keywords and after running it for one of my sites I’ve just noticed it is in places one and two in Google for its main keyword.

It is for different URLs – one is the home page and the other is for a tag page but they both lead to my site which is great.

I’m not sure why or how it happened but it should lead to an increase in traffic if I am the top two sites in Google.

I hope I’m not not doing anything naughty though?

AdWords Ban

The Google AdWords people have been in touch about some of the sites I am promoting with their service and we were in discussion about how I could improve them to make them less like affiliate sites. I gave it a try but short of taking all my affiliate links off the sties I was unable to meet their demands.

I just logged into AdWords after a weekend away and none of my ads have received any impression since half way through October 7. I’ve not had an email or any notification inside AdWords but I am guessing my account has been stopped.

Its a shame but I was relying too much on AdWords and hopefully this will allow me to keep my outgoings down a bit as I was spending about £500 a month with them.

Going On Holiday

Well I am off on my summer holidays next weekend so am frantically trying to tie up as many lose ends as possible regarding my affiliate marketing websites.  I did think about taking the netbook with me but with a 12″ screen it is too big plus where I am going I’m not sure if it would survive the journey.  I did look into getting a cheaper, smaller one but there doesn’t seem to be any £100 or so mini netbooks on the market.

Instead I will try and find some internet cafes and try and do the odd hour here and there although I don’t know how realistic that will be when I have the option of being on the beach or by the pool.

So before I go I will load up the USB stick with all my site info and try to find a FTP programme I can run off the thumb drive so I can easily upload any files.  As I use WordPress now for nearly all my sites updating them shouldn’t be too hard providing I have internet access.

Have a good summer!