Affiliate Marketing and Duplicate content – How do they relate,

So how does affiliate Marketing relate to duplicate content. Here is the case scenario. If a website runs a particular business and sells a product they might be the authority they also might need to run affiliate system for their site.

If that is the case some affiliates give their own website contents / design for their affiliates to sell the products this is a common strategy happening among lot of affiliate businesses so what about duplicate content how do we avoid it?

Ofcourse if 2 websites are identical then Search Engine duplicate content filter kicks in and only 1 website will survive. To avoid this even though the other website runner is a affiliate we need to make sure he gets a unique site not a duplicate of your own website. If your own website is duplicated then you have the risk of loosing all the Business coming to your website. Search engines don’t like duplicate contents and if your site gets caught up in duplicate content filter then it will be lost for a very long time. Today many websites suffer from dupe content filter. We have already discussed about this in our Supplemental pages article.

What is the solution for this?

Best option if you have affiliate who needs website like yours just hire a web designer or buy a simple template setup a website that has information different from yours and give them. Don’t duplicate your website since search engines don’t like them. We had a client who has lot of real estate affiliates and he used to duplicate websites and provide it to his clients we stopped him from doing it since most of the websites he provide his affiliates dont even get indexed. Please avoid all possible duplicate content on your website.

SEO Blog Team,

Adding Multilanguage on your website – Is it duplicate Content,

Adding multiple languages is a common and effective business practice. Lots of websites do this to make sure they cover the Majority of the crowd who dont speak English Language. In US a recent census says 15% of the people are Hispanics that is almost 50 million people.
It is not possible to ignore those people when it comes to doing busines. Most of the Hispanics dont speak good English and this shows the importance to have a website in both spanish in English.

Same way in European union not all countries speak English targeting the regional language is a very important factor to reach the local business. Having a website in various languages are becoming mandatory these days so how does the search engines treat when they see the same information in different languages. From our experience search engines see only the contents and different language contents are unique to themselves.

Spammers from Japan – website spammers from japan hitting us hard

Recently we have seen a surge in comment spamming and contact form spamming from Japanese guys. We get at least 10 to 15 contacts a day from Japan trying to spam our contact form. We always wondered what they get from it. When we see a contact spam we immediately delete it without notice so what are they looking for.

Most probably they are thinking that our contact form is a type of comment spamming weird guys. Some spam contacts we got,

HOME PAGE LOGIN FORM INFORMATION
Prospect_Name : Shigeru Kurisu
EMAIL_Address : kurisu03@carrot.ocn.ne.jp
Website_url :
Phone no :
Discovered seg from : Google
Comments :

HOME PAGE LOGIN FORM INFORMATION
Prospect_Name : Takatoshi Kaneko
EMAIL_Address : puyopuyo@mippi-mail.com
Website_url : an-idol-beautiful-woman.blogspot.com
Phone no : Discovered seg from : Google
Comments :

HOME PAGE LOGIN FORM INFORMATION
Prospect_Name : Kouya Kubota
EMAIL_Address : ocecib276khkm205@yahoo.co.jp
Website_url : snowboarderkk.blogspot.com
Phone no : Discovered seg from : Google Comments :

Highest paying keywords – list of highest paying keywords

According to cyber wire a website which monitors online highest paying keywords mesothelioma and loans still top the list. Lawyers are still the highest paying bidders. Accident attorneys, DUI lawyers, mesothelioma attorneys all pay huge sum due to the stiff competition in their industry,

I just dont want to stuff our blog with all these high spammed keywords. It will make our blog look like one major spam for top paying keywords. SO I am posting a screen shot to avoid the keywords getting crawled

Spying on your competitors – Tried doing it – Spyfu claims to help it out

Spyfu a online ad monitoring company claims to monitor competitor ads and keywords and provide us. Is it true according to spyfu

“SpyFu lets you see which keywords your competitors are buying and which ones they optimize their site for. Once you understand the competition, you can beat them at their own game or your can exploit their weaknesses.
We get our data directly from the source; there are no middlemen. Every month, we extract 125 million ads and search results directly…”

Anyone tried using Spyfu before, We want to give it a try and see how it really.

Imagine a real estate company in phoenix area wants to know what an other competitor in the same area spends on his online ads. They can go to spyfu buy the basic CPC keywords for their area and it will give them an insight on how much their competitor is spending on the keywords. To calculate results Spyfu uses google’s ad estimator and their own collection of 2 million keywords and compare them with real competitor sites. Other major sources from where data is extracted include dmoz, Dunn&Brad Street, Hoovers, and Wikipedia.

A spending data for geico looks similar to what they did in their SEC filing. Experts predict a 80 to 90% accuracy with spyfu data,

Open letter we received thinking that we are Google,

A Open Letter I received from our website User thinking that we are google LOL, It was horribly written probably this guy is not a English native

Hello,

I am not a computer expert ,I spent a year and a half learning how to and building my site ,I held the No #1 spot for my category, this was no accident , I spent another year and a half matching my setup to my site, now I am 50thwhen computer people play games with the internet it has REAL consequences to REAL people,what google has done is WRONG.We would have gladly paid them there F bribe money had we know what was a foot.

Dear Goggle

I can not begine to tell you how angry I am.a year and a half of back breaking work.$250,000 investment in building and equipment a year and a half building my site and bikes, and driving it to the top of the rateings. Just to have my hopes and dreams distroyed, by your damm algorium. if you think this will make you the kings of industy, on the backs of the citizens, WRONG!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!further more , its people like me and websites like mine that let people like you live in your gilded palices and I am only one small TO YOU personSHAME AND DISHONOR TO YOU!!! in case you have the balls to respond to this email!Kim.southlakeenterprize.com

How much are websites worth – Tip of the day

Many always wondered what their hard designed and developed website is worth. Lots of sites provide ways to evaluate the value of a domain name. When it comes to search engine optimization and search engine marketing value of a domain name is based on

Backlinks: Links that are pointing to that website from external websites.

Quality backlinks: Backlinks mean one thing quality backlinks mean an other. A link from Yahoo homepage is a million times more valuable than a link from a Mom and pop site, Its important to research the quality of backlinks that are pointing to that site,

Dmoz listing: Dmoz is the world’s leading human edited directory a listing in Dmoz adds the value to a website since dmoz plays a very important role in search engine’s way of guaging the value of a website.

Links from high pagerank sites: If the site being sold has links from many high pagerank websites it will definitely boost the value of the domain

Pagerank of the site itself: Pagerank is google’s proprietary core algorithm of judging the value of websites. Even though pagerank doesn’t matter much anymore when it comes to selling sites a good pagerank website will go for a high price

Quality of information on website: A Spam directory is much less valuable than a site with quality pages and quality information, its important that the site has quality information.

Targeted industry: If its a quality site and targets industries like automobiles, real estate etc it is valued much higher.

Uniqueness of information : A site with lots of unique information is important duplicate sites are not gonna go for much money.

Existing traffic and projected traffic: This is last but not the least option when it comes to judging sites if a site is already getting 3000 uniques per day then it should be a very good site. Our site gets anywhere between an average of 2500 uniques to 4000 uniques per day. So you judge the price .

So judging by these points what’s your website worth care to share? Soon we are releasing a new SEO tool which will predict the price of a website based on the above criteria till that time you can use this tool. directory.sootle.com/website-worth

Promoting website for Social networking sites

I have got requests from clients to promote their sites in social networking sites like Myspace, Orkut, Facebook, Friendster etc. We stayed away from it because it looks like too much spam for me. Myspace , orkut, facebook are all sites for youngsters to meet their friends and relatives online. We cannot disturb them by promoting our material, Personally if I find someone trying to promote something to my myspace profile ill find all the best ways to get him banned from Myspace

If you really want to advertise for people in social networking sites go for the paid option myspace, orkut, facebook all have paid ads which will be shown to their visitors. I recommend going by that option

Personal blogs are the best one to promote in social networking sites. If you have friends in myspace you can add a link to your personal blog in your profile and this will definetely make your friends see your blog if they like your blog it will be bookmarked and they will visit your site regularly to read interesting information in it.

I recommend if you want to promote in myspace or facebook do for your blog .

Special Characters, Smileys in Meta Description – Helps or hurts

How many of you have seen sites which use special characters / smileys in their title and meta tags. I have personally come across a lot of sites doing it .

Having smiley’s in title and targeting a commercial audience IMO is not a great idea. when people are looking for professional company to do service for them its better we stay away from all those playful stuff in titles but if its a site servicing a crowd that likes stuff like that we can definitely do it.

Whether it affects ROI or not is a question we never tested it if someone has tested please post your experiences here

Yahoo Open search to support Microformats

Yahoo’s Amit mar has mentioned in their official Yahoo search blog that Yahoo will be supporting Microformats in their opensearch

According to yahoo
“By supporting semantic web standards, Yahoo! Search and site owners can bring a far richer and more useful search experience to consumers. For example, by marking up its profile pages with microformats, LinkedIn can allow Yahoo! Search and others to understand the semantic content and the relationships of the many components of its site. With a richer understanding of LinkedIn’s structured data included in our index, we will be able to present users with more compelling and useful search results for their site. The benefit to LinkedIn is, of course, increased traffic quality and quantity from sites like Yahoo! Search that utilize its structured data. “

So what is Microformat According to wikipedia

A microformat (sometimes abbreviated μF or uF) is a web-based[1] data formatting approach that seeks to re-use existing content as metadata, using only XHTML and HTML classes[2] and attributes.[3] This approach is intended to allow information intended for end-users (such as contact information, geographic coordinates, calendar events, and the like) to also be automatically processed by software.
Although the content of web pages is technically already capable of “automated processing,” and has been since the inception of the web, there are certain limitations. This is because the traditional markup tags used to display information on the web do not describe what the information means.[4] Microformats are intended to bridge this gap by attaching semantics, and thereby obviate other, more complicated methods of automated processing, such as natural language processing or screen scraping. The use, adoption and processing of microformats enables data items to be indexed, searched for, saved or cross-referenced, so that information can be reused or combined.[4]
Current microformats allow the encoding and extraction of events, contact information, social relationships and so on. More are being developed. Version 3 of the Firefox browser,[5] as well as version 8 of Internet Explorer[6] are expected to include native support for microformats.

Several microformats have been developed to enable semantic markup of particular types of information.

hAtom – for marking up Atom feeds from within standard HTML
hCalendar – for events
hCard – for contact information; includes:
adr – for postal addresses
geo – for geographical coordinates (latitude, longitude)
hReview – for reviews
hResume – for resumes or CVs
rel-directory – for distributed directory creation and inclusion
rel-nofollow, an attempt to discourage 3rd party content spam (e.g. spam in blogs).
rel-tag – for decentralized tagging (Folksonomy)
xFolk – for tagged links
XHTML Friends Network (XFN) – for social relationships
XOXO – for lists and outlines

[edit] Proposed microformats
Among the many proposed microformats,[9] the following are undergoing active development:

citation – for citing references
currency – for amounts of money
geo extensions – for places on Mars, The Moon, and other such bodies; for altitude; and for collections of waypoints marking routes or boundaries
species – For the names of living things.
measurements – For physical quantities, structured data-values.

[edit] Uses of microformats
Using microformats within HTML code provides additional formatting and semantic data that can be used by applications. These could be applications that collect data about on-line resources, such as web crawlers, or desktop applications such as e-mail clients or scheduling software.

Several browser extensions, such as Operator, provide the ability to detect microformats within an HTML document and export them into formats compatible with contact management and calendar utilities, such as Microsoft Outlook.

Microsoft expressed a desire to incorporate Microformats into upcoming projects;[10] as have other software companies.

In Wikipedia – and more generally in MediaWiki – microformats are used as part of templates like {{coord}}.

[edit] Evaluation of microformats
Various commentators have offered review and discussion on the design principles and practical aspects of microformats. Additionally, microformats have been compared to other approaches that seek to serve the same or similar purpose.[11] From time to time, there is criticism of a single, or all, microformats.[11] Documented efforts to advocate both the spread and use of microformats are known to exist as well.[12] [13] Håkon Wium Lie has said we will see “a bunch of microformats being developed, and that’s how the semantic web will be built.” [14]

[edit] Design principles
Computer scientist and entrepreneur, Rohit Khare stated that reduce, reuse, and recycle is “shorthand for several design principles” that motivated the development and practices behind microformats.[8][15] These aspects can be summarized as follows:

Reduce: favor the simplest solutions and focus attention on specific problems;
Reuse: work from experience and favor examples of current practice;
Recycle: encourage modularity and the ability to embed, valid XHTML can be reused in blog posts, RSS feeds, and anywhere else you can access the web.[8]

[edit] Accessibility
Because some microformats make use of title attribute of HTML’s abbr element to conceal machine-readable data (particularly date-times and geographical coordinates) in the “abbr design pattern”, the plain text content of the element is inaccessible to those screenreaders that expand abbreviations.[16]

[edit] Intellectual property
As part of the open participation model of the microformats community to require that all contributions be placed into the public domain. This means that any page created, or any content added to microformats is placed into the public domain for maximum possible reuse.

[edit] Alternative approaches
Microformats are not the only solution for providing “more intelligent data” on the web. Alternative approaches exist and are under development as well. For example, the use of XML markup and standards of the semantic web are cited as alternative approaches. [8] Some contrast these with microformats in that they do not necessarily coincide with the design principles of “reduce, reuse, and recycle”, at least not to the same extent.[8]

One advocate of microformats, Tantek Çelik, characterized a problem with alternative approaches:

“ Here’s a new language we want you to learn, and now you need to output these additional files on your server. It’s a hassle. (Microformats) lower the barrier to entry.[4] ”

For some applications the use of other approaches may be valid. If one wishes to use microformat-style embedding but the type of data one wishes to embed does not map to an existing microformat, one can use RDFa to embed arbitrary vocabularies into HTML. An example of this would be embedding domain-specific scientific data on the Web like zoological or chemical data, where no microformat for such data exists. Furthermore, standards such as W3C’s GRDDL allow microformats to be converted into data compatible with the Semantic Web.[17]

Another advocate of microformats, Ryan King, put the compatibility of microformats with other approaches this way:

“ Microformats provide an easy way for many people to contribute semantic data to the web. With GRDDL all of that data is made available for RDF Semantic Web tools. Microformats and GRDDL can work together to build a better web. [17]