DISQUS

@Antone Roundy -

Not really.... at least not with many marketers

Whilst they might claim that they mail using your affiliate link, that doesn't help if they give the products away as bonuses for something else.

A $5000 bonus in pretty real value (as in products people really were buying for that recently) for a $2000 sale seems to be becoming common.

There are very few marketers who can put together a $5000 bonus package without including some, or all of their premium products.

Any that are not tempted but sign up anyway to another list a few months later will be offered that 2nd product as a bonus for the original product... as long as they clear cookies.

The person who originally provided the lead, and even presold the first product in many cases doesn't matter.

I have other pet gripes... 10+ affiliate links in the free material leading up to a launch, horrible viral inviters asking for passwords, retweet scripts that are a "leak" etc

There is another dimension to this

You send leads that didn't convert

The product owner on the next affiliate launch they promote offers your leads that very same product for free, if they buy the other product.

You as an affiliate earn nothing from that, yet did a share of the work in establishing value for what ended up being offered as a bonus.

It is quite possible that those same leads might have purchased at a later date, after an extended sales period, maybe a slightly different offer.

I decided a long time ago that I am not going to waste material that could contribute significantly to the value of products I might launch in the future, just for a product launch bonus.

I also refuse to promote people now who offer the products I promoted as an affiliate a few days/weeks later as a bonus to another promotion.

I went into a little bit more depth on it here, and am going to link through as you covered some points I didn't, as I don't deal with many of the large CPA networks.
http://andybeard.eu/1578/affiliate-product-laun...

It affects me all the time, I set my own goals too high.

Well in theory my primary online dashboard isn't WordPress but Gmail - I am planning on testing for a while if only to streamline comments a little

Ignore PageRank when commenting, build relationships with people in your niche - it is just a bonus.
If you have a lot of comments on your blog, based on clarification today by Matt Cutts, it could have a negative effect.

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Michael yes we had the discussion, and you continued to maintain an internal linking structure that limited the ability for Google to index all your content. Either PageRank sculpting or a good/better IA can help with that. I can't see "air" a mixture of various invisible to the eye molecular structures, but I can sure blow out a candle.

If you are building small sites it is easy to ignore, but when you are trying to get millions of pages indexed, or even your blog archives, it can become a major issue.

You have major indexing problems on your site, and just adding more links isn't going to help it.

It is not something that necessarily needs nofollow - nofollow is just a tool we used to be able to use, and possibly still can, but just because you don't use nofollow doesn't mean you are not attempting to control the flow of PageRank

Michael didn't disprove anything and as I discussed a while back, it is easy to prove that there is a need for PR sculpting, with or without the use of nofollow due to indexation problems even on Michael's own blog.

You have no idea what PageRank any of your pages have, because you can't see it.

Toolbar PageRank has value, otherwise I wouldn't get so many people looking to spam links coming to my blog.

Then I delete their links, or their whole comment

I don't think he lied, plus Matt is not one of the engineers designing this.

Lots of decisions about how links are used depend on the order things are done.

As an example, we know there are problems with nofollowed links and first link priority, and that is a clue for PageRank as well.

If anchor text can count on a nofollowed link, that means that the nofollowed links are not totally removed from later calculations

We also know they appear in Google's webmaster tools

What we don't know, just like with links blocked with Robots.txt and creating hanging/dnagling pages, is whether all of the juice is lost, or just part of it, dpending of circumstances.

We don't even know whether links on different parts of a page influence PageRank in different ways. A login is sitewide, navigation link, not unique or even interesting anchor text, internal, maybe to SSL page etc etc. These are all factors that might reduce PR being passed even if the link isn't nofollowed.

Of the SMX coverage links, that is why you got the first.

You almost gained a "Source of Knowledge" link too, but I think Leslie and Michael probably deserve the limelight a little more, though you benefit from the STSE links too. Looking forward to the Monday post, and the "takeitlikeaman" algo.

I gained a similar impression from copious reading, though on some sites I use it very aggressively.

Nofollowing all external links is stupid - you just become like Wikipedia. You also end up gaining less links.

If you read the post I mentioned I have seen no effect on Wikipedia rankings, but you would need to have a thorough understanding of PageRank calculations to understand why, which is why I included references where you can really learn this stuff.

Noindex doesn't affect PageRank, at least not necessarily - pages with noindex accumulate PageRank and pass it on like before, though I have read a few people speculate that pages that are indexed might pass more meaningful juice, but that is speculation.
I don't noindex category and tag pages.

Most of the linking structures can be achieved without using Dynamic linking, though it certainly requires a little more thought

Up until this point (after the techniques have been used for 6 years) Google has done nothing to discourage the use of dynamic linking using javascript and later nofollow, and in the video, which could be looked on as official, only recently released, Google (well Matt Cutts) is still suggesting that nofollow can be used on thngs like login pages.

Imagine if you had a sales page for a membership site that only had 3 links, one to legal papers, one a design credit link, and the third to a login page.

If the juice from the login link evaporates, then a third of the juice that could be passed to the 2 other links just evaporates.

This isn't about gaming Google, and SEO isn't about gaming Google. Sure it is competitive, but the primary aim is to help good companies rank for the terms that end users are using to search for their goods, services or information.

One of the more technical aspects is PageRank distbutribution - it is not just helping a single page rank higher, but ensuring that as many relevant quality pages of content are actually indexed and have a chance to rank.

It is impossible to determine the extent of the evaporating, but the evaporating would probably be similar to the way PageRank can evaporate with pages blocked with Robots.txt, which has happened for 10 years, in amounts impossible to really determine and quite possibly also variable.

If you don't understand the post, just read some of the resources in the introduction or don't worry about it - I highly doubt PageRank will evaporate from comment links in Google's new implementation of the way they handle PageRank

I am thinking about running an "Ask Andy" session every Thursday, but I will run it somehow as a liveblogging session from my blog as well with a few tools I have found.

I could also combine it with livestreaming, but bandwidth from here isn't perfect.

Why Thursday? Not to be totally materialistic about it, but people remember it on Follow Fridays, and quite often give special thanks because you were helpful - not the usual lists, but special mentions

I actually quite like the Thematic way of doing this. On the home page the H1 is the tagline, and on single posts the post title.

However in theory single posts should be using the short title for the h1, as it is more specific, and if we are going to listen to the guys from Stompernet, each page should be optimized for only a single keyword, especially as every niche becomes more competitive.

Just want to emphasise I don't want SEO as part of the WP core, I want plugins like Headspace to to concentrate more on core functionality that push them well beyond what could or should be part of a theme.

I know Headspace has mass edit of tags, in some ways it works as an alternative to the Simple Tags method, where you can edit an individual tag, and it is changed for all occurances, but neither are perfect when you are editing lots of tags.

Simple tags probably needs to add some ajax, or remember which page you are currently working on. As it is, you make a change to one tag, and the whole page refreshes and you are back to the first listing of 50 tags - if you were working on the 20th page of tags, that becomes a major issue.

Hey Zain, been hoping for an email alerting me to the release of FAQ pro

Ok Anchors... only definitive reference I know of... Matt Cutts
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-glossary-url-...

See the “#00h02m30s”? That’s called a fragment or a named anchor. The Googlers I’ve talked to are split right down the middle on which way to refer it. Disputes on what to call it can be settled with arm wrestling, dance-offs, or drinking contests. Typically the fragment is used to refer to an internal section within a web document. In this case, the named anchor means “skip to 2 minutes and 30 seconds into the video.” I think right now Google standardizes urls by removing any fragments from the url.

Emphasis placed on last sentence

Not linking to John was oversight, about to be corrected.

In many ways short title is built in, as you have custom meta - how you use it really depends on the theme, widgets etc.
Just to give you an example, Headspace doesn't work with Thematic out of the box even with the meta Title. I had to first of all replace the custom title code with a filter.

But that isn't something I necessarily complain about, because it also gives me more flexibility.

The more features become built in around a standard way of doing things, forcing me to "setup" a plugin rather than just use it, the less likely I am going to use it, but then I am a geek.

I can think of 10-20 different places where I can use Short Title for posts to gain a competitive advantage, and there is no realistic way of doing it directly within Headspace because it would be both theme and plugin selection dependent.

The nearest would be just to create a wp_list_titles() replacement, similar to the short title for pages plugin, but then that is something I can do in functions.php

I think with WordPress plugins you have 4 options

1. Monetize with development work
2. Monetize with a service
3. Hyperspecialize
4. Massive volume
5. Even more volume - become a real framework

Headspace is closer probably to the 3rd option, but might need to take it further, and then add a subscription to make money from it.

Headspace replaces lots of other plugins, but that doesn't necessarily help me, because I still have to login and configure, and even remember which things I want to use.
A lot of the features are in many ways fluff, though possibly true to the original concept of doing everything in the header.

Imagine by default you uploaded 1000 plugins with every WP installation, then you have to work out which ones to configure, which ones you use a different plugin for already etc. That is currently Headspace and to a large extent all plugins.

I don't use the tag functionality - simple tags does it better, though still doesn't work as well as UTW. When you have 1500 or so tags to edit, it isn't fun with any current solution.

Whilst it is intended to be a framework, you won't see people creating modules, because modules seem to be hard coded.
I haven't tested it, but if I removed all the modules from the installation, Headspace would probably break.
A very powerful method to boost Headspace would be to improve the modules, and documentation, such that developers would be developing modules for Headspace, not stand alone plugins.

The same is true for Redirection - it is powerful, but the average user just wants something to allow them to change their permalinks, and doesn't know regex, possibly avoiding issues with verbose queries (if they know what those are, though most wouldn't)


I am fighting the battle that WordPress themes and frameworks shouldn't be handling SEO features, and the only way to win that is to take SEO plugins out of their reach with unique core features.

e.g Import / Export
http://www.wpseo.org/license/

Shorttag support for the custom meta

Function calls people understand for custom meta
hs_custom_meta('shorttitle') not MetaData::get_custom ('shorttitle')
Function calls people understand even for basic functions
hs_meta_title() not MetaData::get_page_title ($post->ID);

Found the reason - Nofollow Reciprocity Plugin
http://www.inverudio.com/programs/WordPressBlog...

Now need to look in the code to see if it was innocent mistake by author - also was nofollowing Shaun

Between the simple solution and the geeky one, there are a few other possibilities, but repeating them would have effectively been taking too much substance from Leslie's videos, and might have touched on things within STSE2

I have actually mentioned a particular launch 3 times on my blog in the last week, but hopefully I used the opportunity to highlight some additional issues or provide some unique value to the content.
One thing I made sure I didn't do is offer a bonus - sure it would have added a few sales, but whatever I could have offered would have been dwarfed by the "mega bundles", and ultimately would have taken something unique away to anything I might offer in the future, unless I offered a whole load of PLR.

Here is the way I look at it

Affiliate Sales x 1000% with bonus < Own product sales +110%

Offering a bonus might increase my affiliate sales 10 fold, but the same bonus would most likely increase the sales of one of my own products by more than 10%

The only way a bonus fits into my calculations is when it would tie into the work I would have to do anyway, or as a suitable way of gathering testimonials for a beta product before launch.

If I had a staff of 30 pumping out material, or a good bonus only cost me 1hour on the telephone, maybe I would have a different perspective.