| LED Digest 1820: Using Affiliates, AdSense and Alexa |
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================================================== The LED Digest Moderated Discussion List "Effective Online Advertising, Since 1997" pair Networks: The LED's Web Host Hosting and Domain Reg. from a Trusted Leader pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains ================================================== List Moderator: Published by: Adam Audette LED Digest adam,led-digest.com http://www.led-digest.com ................................................ June 15, 2004 Issue #1820 ................................................ .....IN THIS DIGEST..... ===== NEW ======================= <Moderator Comment> --== Using Affiliate Services ==-- ~ Ellyce S. "Did you find affiliates to be a successful component of your marketing strategy?" --== Google AdSense ==-- ~ Dirk van der Werff "I can't get ANY AdSense ads to kick in for the home page..." ==== CONTINUING ================= --== Website Structure & Profitability ==-- ~ Ken Evoy "So overall, [Alexa's] still a great 'big picture' tool." ~ Theresa Mesa "You might also want to consider redesigning your site using CSS." ==== BILLBOARD =================== --== Outbound Links Increasing Rankings ==-- ~ Jill Whalen ~ Steve Pronger --== ShareYourExperience Scam? ==-- ~ Greg Robbins ======= NEW ===================================== <Moderator Comment> Sorry for the delays this week -- I returned Sunday night bleary eyed and completely spent from 4 days with friends in Sun Valley. It was my bachelor party, the old tradition of destroying any speck of interest in a man's taste for alcohol... one drink at a time! We had a great time, and Sun Valley is a really fun place with great mountain biking that I'd like to visit again (in a more sober mood). Back to work... Best wishes, Adam | adam, led-digest.com ------------------ From: Ellyce S. Subject: Advertising with Affiliates Dear Adam and LED Digest Readers: Has anyone advertised with affiliates like Commission Junction, Performics, or Affiliate Fuel in a pay-for-sale arrangement (you pay a commission to publishers on sales generated from ads on their site)? If so, what was your experience like? What kind of sales did your ads on the affiliate's publisher sites generate (large numbers of sales, few sales, etc.)? Did you find affiliates to be a successful component of your marketing strategy? In your experience, did using affiliates like the companies mentioned above produce results similiar to running pay-per-click ads on Google and Overture? Thank you, Ellyce S. www.coverbonanza.com ------- new post - new topic ------- From: Dirk van der Werff Subject: Google AdSense Hi ... after many years on this list I have to say thank you to all of you for adding to my knowledge ... After a 6 month refit ... I'm close to going live with a third version of my site in 8 years. I've been persuaded to include Google Adsense on it... and it seems to kick in very well and others tell me that the return for a large site such as my own should be worthwhile. BUT, I can't get ANY Adsense ads to kick in for the home page... any other page usually loads of four ads a time as expected... all the individual plants, everything loads them in fine, but the homepage (which is still a work in progress by the way... has none. Can any of you gurus out there tell me what is wrong... there isn't great content I know, but many keywords which are included in other pages which relate to the content work elsewhere - but not on this page. Even the search page, which isn't even made yet (click the link) loads in Adsense ads for goodness sake...... If ads do kick in if you are viewing from the US then let me know too... as they certainly don't load from my base in the UK... my guess is that they don't load in for that particular page from anywhere, but I may be wrong It is probably staring me in the face... but If you can give me a pointer to solve this one I owe you all a beer! http://81.29.69.240/sites/plants/index.html many thanks once again Dirk van der Werff, Editor / Publisher Plants / Aquilegia Publishing http://www.plants-magazine.com/index.asp dirk, plants-magazine.com ===== CONTINUING ================================= From: Ken Evoy Subject: Site structure > Alexa rankings are useless for most websites. Alexa is > only mildly accurate if you are in the top 10,000 or so sites. - Aaron Wall, LED 1819 Hi to all, It's true that what we call "scatter" increases as site rankings decrease, but we study well over 10,000 sites, their Alexa rankings and correlate to the visitor counts. Yes, there are sites with high rankings and low traffic and vice-versa. And yes, "best fit" analysis certainly sees wider scatter at an Alexa ranking of 100K than 10K, and wider still at 500K. Up to about 500K, there is still an OVERALL decrease in traffic with worsening (higher) Alexa ranking (but the scatter *IS* very high at 500K). So overall, it's still a great "big picture" tool. To get the meat out of Alexa, understand exactly how it works and how best to use it. Do NOT try to get something out of it that Alexa simply does not deliver (ex., EXACT traffic correlation). For example, our own site, sitesell.com has dropped from about 220 to 280 without a drop in actual traffic. We don't get agitated about it. Possible reasons for the aberrancy... 1) a change in algo that affects "statistical sampling bias" -- I suspect this one since most other Net marketing oriented sites have also been dropping during this period. 2) it's not good enough to slow in growth (our traffic has only increased by a few points over the past two months, during what is a "no news" intensive dev phase) -- others will pass you in traffic. If that's the case, several major upcoming launches should show a reversal of this trend. "Trend" and "long-term" are important words when thinking about Alexa. And another reason it doesn't bother us -- it's most important as a "big picture" trend-tracker vs. your competitors. For example, our big picture remains the same -- we're still well inside the Top 1,000 and we've passed all our competitors with sights set on bigger players in the competitive arena. So we are not focused on DRIVING Alexa scores... what's the point? AND we know our traffic is strong (from our own internal visitor stats), customer surveys consistently show that customers are raving-happy, and THOSE are far more important metrics, of course. So, if you keep the "Alexa perspective" in its place... It's a tremendous tool, as long as you understand that it's not perfect, what the limitations are, and how to interpret and use the results... and when to ignore them as suspect-to-useless. For that info, we've posted an article in our Tips 'n Techniques HQ for SBI! users... http://build.sitesell.com/tips/alexa-rankings.html I hope this helps. All the best, Ken Evoy, President SiteSell.com http://webmaster.sitesell.com/ ------- new post - same topic ------- From: Theresa Mesa Subject: Site structure > I was told to re-design the site (which I am willing to do) and > to create sections of each page as PHP. - Brian R., LED 1817 You might also want to consider redesigning your site using CSS. This doesn't help you content-wise, unless you use server-side includes, but it does help you formatting wise. Your pages will also download faster. Theresa Mesa www.mesadesignhouse.com webmaster, mesadesignhouse.com ==== BILLBOARD ==================================== From: Jill Whalen Subject: Outbound links Hey LEDers... Karl Baldwin had an interesting post [issue 1815] studying whether outbound links help or hurt rankings in Google. I'm not a believer in PageRank leakage (although I understand that mathematically it exists to a certain extent), and it's nice to see some statistics which show that outbound links actually help rankings, as opposed to hurt them. However, there's a problem with the conclusion in the article Karl referenced: > The result is very conclusive. Both leading search engines rank > pages with more links much higher than pages with fewer links! ... > SEOs touting the "PR Leak" theory are simply wrong. If their > theory held any weight at all, we should see the exact opposite. You have not proved that pages don't leak PR. You've only proved that outbound links don't hurt rankings. This is a very important distinction that many people don't get. Outbound links may very well leak PageRank, but that's not what you measured; you only measured rankings in the search results for a keyword query. What you did prove, was much more important than whether PageRank leaks, however. You proved that even if you do leak PageRank, it makes no difference to your site, and that the benefits of linking out far outweigh any PR leakage that may occur (if indeed it even does). This is because PageRank plays such a minor role in how sites rank in the search results. It's important for everyone on this list to understand that their PageRank score isn't what gets them ranked highly in Google for their targeted keyword phrases. It's one factor among many that are looked at to determine ranking, and it's not even a big factor. I suggest that everyone stop looking at it at all, because it keeps people focused on the wrong metrics. One final note. When I and others talk about PageRank being relatively unimportant, please don't misconstrue this as saying that linking in and of itself is unimportant. Links are extremely important for rankings in all of the major search engines, especially when the appropriate anchor text is used within them. PageRank, however, is less important and is only a subset linking. Hope this helps clear up some confusion! Best, Jill Whalen Join the High Rankings Forum! http://www.highrankings.com/forum ------- new post - same topic ------- From: Steve Pronger Subject: Outbound links Just thought I'd throw this one in. It's a quote from Mike Cutts, Software Engineer, Google. It's from the Link Building Basics seminar from the Search Engine Strategies Conference London. The full report can be read at: http://forums.seochat.com/t11609/s.html --------------------- "Matt also said (possibly let slip) that thematic incoming links from authority sites carry more weight than on-page optimization. That concurs with my own research. The evidence is in the search term "computers" on google. The top ranked site (Apple) does not have the term anywhere on the visible page or source code. Not once. Yet it is ranked top from 69,300,000 competing pages. The Apple homepage could well have been used as a "before" in a before and after case study on the "writing for search engines" or "search engine friendly design" seminars. "Off page optimization is now more important than on-page. A Google software engineer had just confirmed what many professional SEMs have believed for a while." --------------------- Steve Pronger http://www.stevepronger.com ------- new post - new topic ------- From: Greg Robbins Subject: Is shareyourexperience.com a scam? Hi all LED-ers I'm wondering if any of you have any experience or knowledge of www.shareyourexperiences.com. It purports to be a site where members can ask if anyone has experience of another individual. I've been contacted by them to say that someone has requested information about me, but I can't check without registering. As I the chances of anyone on a randomly picked forum knowing me are pretty remote, it seems much more like a scam to drive up traffic or verify addresses or some such. On the other hand, I would like to know if anyone is researching me - if anyone was grubbing round to find dirt to throw it might be important to be forewarned. The link apparently to a post about me was http://2.shyxp.biz/lx.php?a=search&b=5&c= This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it The site actually encourages people to pretend to be someone else to find out the reason for the request (FAQ page), which maybe should answer my own question, but any real information would be good to hear, before we all get e-mailed the same message. Greg Robbins Islington Secretary www.islington.nasuwt.org.uk ------------------------------------------------------- The LED Digest is sponsored by pair Networks: pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains Copyright 1995-2004 Adam Audette. All Rights Reserved. ----------------------------------------------------------------- "A faithful friend is the medicine of life." - Apocrypha |
