Pretty Quiet on the Blogging Front

It's the end of the month and I realized I've barely posted at all in the last few weeks. There are at least half a dozen posts started but never finished just sitting in the queue, but a heck of a lot of good that does anyone.

So, yeah, I've been pretty busy. Lotsa stuff going on at work. I can't really talk about it (shhhh) but I'll mention that I had to lay off two of my staff, which was really hard to do. I'm also spending more time on brand management (again) and product merchandising, the latter of which generates a greater sense of urgency going into the holiday season than SEO projects do. (Xmas SEO? Puh-leeze, we took care of that back in July. J/K)

Obviously the big SEO chatter this month was about the contentious paid links debate and the related issue of several major sites (like the WashingtonPost.com, for example) losing a lot of PageRank. Bruce Clay does a nice job of rounding up relevant posts on the subject here and here. If you haven't been following the debate, you might want to start with Rand's roundup of the links session at SES San Jose.

Other news some of you may find interesting is that Google seems to be changing the way it displays sitelinks (at least intermittently). Here's an example of the new 8-link layout I'm seeing a lot in Google's sitelinks:

I'm hopeful that I'll be able to start blogging again more regularly soon, once the work drama subsides (assuming it does).

Labels: Google, industry buzz, link-building, navel-gazing

Posted by Melanie Phung

How Search Engines Are Like Swingers

This week's quote of the week comes to us courtesy of Kevin Ryan of Search Engine Watch:

We know that search sites trade query induced traffic like swingers swapping wives. Each one offers the same basic operation but sometimes it’s that little variance in style or positioning that makes all the difference.

Labels: quote-of-the-week

Posted by Melanie Phung

Disguising Affiliate Links on WordPress-Hosted Blogs

In a post I did this summer, I mentioned that WordPress automatically strips out affiliate links (i.e., tags containing URLs it can identify as affiliate links) from blogs hosted by WordPress. Links from affiliate programs like LinkShare, for example, are pretty easy to spot because they pass through a LinkShare URL before taking the user to the merchant page. That's for tracking purposes. (Commission Junction, on the other hand, masks its pass-through links so they are harder for WordPress to identify, and thus I've been able to add CJ links to my WordPress blog with no problem.)

If you're a LinkShare affiliate and hosting your site on WordPress, getting those links into your posts is really simple. The truth is that you do not need to "copy and paste the code EXACTLY as you see it in the box" as LinkShare instructs.

You can simply disguise your affiliate links by using a service like urlTea (pronounced "Earl" like the tea) or tinyurl.com.

Replace each of the URLs in the HTML you're supposed to copy and paste with tinyurls, including links to the tracking pixel, images, etc. and everything will work the way it's supposed to. If you don't know how to identify those in the code, just look for anything that starts with "http" - that's the URL. Replace the whole address with the new shorter URL created via urlTea or tinyurl.

If you don't care about tracking hits, only click-throughs, on plain text link elements, you don't even need to do all that. Just identify the URL for the link, transform that URL with one of the above mentioned services, and use the new link in your blog posting with whatever anchor text you want (you don't actually have to use the anchor text you're given for the link to work).

Become a LinkShare affiliate
Create a WordPress blog.

Labels: monetizing

Posted by Melanie Phung

"Google Is Truly Making People Retarded"

Sorry for the political incorrectness in that title, but the guys over at Copyblogger sure know how to get your attention with powerful copywriting. I practically snorted coffee through my nose when I got to that line in the post titled Does Telling Someone to “Click Here” Actually Matter?.

"Google is truly making people retarded" is my quote of the week, both for making me laugh and for reminding us that everything is not always all about keyword optimization.

Click here to read the article.

Posted by Melanie Phung