Analysis of a Google Slap

Posted on May 1, 2012 by admin

On March 8, 2012 my traffic plunged by about 40%.

At the same time, people were complaining that the Ebay Partner Network (EPN) data feed was taking up to two minutes to return data, if any data was returned at all. EPN affiliates were panicking, especially those who were users of software like PhpBay. I'm one of them. Here's the data feed thread over at the EPN forum.

It took about three days before I came up with a solution with help from the folks at the PhpBay forum. I doctored the PHP code to use a five second timeout. It took even longer before Ebay admitted they had a problem. In the meantime, I was in worse trouble than I thought. The traffic was still not coming back. Continue reading →

Posted in Ebay Partner Network, Search Engines | Leave a comment

Chassidic Response to a Google Slap

Posted on May 1, 2012 by admin

Like many people out there, I fell victim to a Panda-induced Google slap. In all honesty, I can't say I was nailed by Panda since I have other theories. However, many of my sites were removed from the Google index and it's time to fix this.
I have seen several case studies of how to fix up your sites and beg reinstatement from the big G. But as a thin-content guy, it's kind of hard.
(I will eventually post an analysis of my Google slap, which will explain some of the steps I am taking here.)
After performing this technique, Google has indexed the sites. Some have ranked well. Some have dropped - but they are still in the index. This leads me to think that Panda wasn't the cause of the Google zetz I received. Continue reading →

Posted in Search Engines | Leave a comment

Review of SMX Israel 2012

Posted on January 18, 2012 by admin

Earlier this week, I attended Search Marketing Expo Israel 2012.

Here are my thoughts on the day:

I started out with the lecture on SEO From Basic to Advanced. There was almost no basic, which wasn't a problem for me since I think I know a thing or two.
Takeaways:

  • Use fresh content. New text, new photos, etc. According to Eli Feldblum, the SE's look at the date in the image file's header.
  • Use "schema" for getting better text descriptions in the SERP's.
  • Use image sitemaps. Apparently image information can be added to sitemaps. I'll be checking this out with an add-on to xml-sitemaps.com.

Roman Z. (I'm not even gonna try to spell his last name) mentioned using multiple domains and sites to grab slightly different segments of your clientele. Olivier Amar said to link most of your incoming backlinks to the main page.
Continue reading →

Posted in Affiliate Marketing, Search Engines | 1 Comment

SMX Israel 2012 Lineup

Posted on January 18, 2012 by admin

I attended Search Marketing Expo Israel 2012 earlier this week. Since the lineup is on a page that might change, I've copied it here. I'll give my review in the near future.

Here's the lineup that was:

SMX Israel 2012 Agenda

Track A Track B Track C
7:30 – 9:00 REGISTRATION
9:00 – 10:15 SEO From Basic to Advanced Reputation Management In House SEM
10:15 – 10:45 BREAK
10:45 – 12:00 PPC From Basic to Advanced Google Panda, Freshness
& More		 Hebrew SEO
12:00 – 12:15 BREAK
12:15 – 13:30 Link Building Analytics & Landing Page Optimization Mobile SEO & PPC Tips
13:30 – 15:00 LUNCH
15:00 – 16:15 Aggressive Black Hat SEO Facebook, Twitter & Google+ Expert Site Clinic
16:15 – 16:45 BREAK
16:45 – 18:00 Legal Issues in Search Meet Tomer From Google SEO Tools

Continue reading →

Posted in Affiliate Marketing | 1 Comment

Some Updates to Previous Posts

Posted on January 17, 2012 by admin

I updated the post Fighting the Bots, Socially to tell about a different method of stopping bad EPN clicks.

I hope to update my webhosting review post. I am in the process of dumping one or two webhosts. I also signed on with HostGator, who had a pretty good holiday-season deal.

I'm also going to get around to writing about SMX Israel 2012, which I attended on January 15, 2012.

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PhpZon API with Caching

Posted on January 17, 2012 by admin

I haven't posted for a while, but I've got a lot on my mind, so away we go.

One of the problems for webmasters on low-cost hosting plans is that while the hosts claim you have unlimited bandwidth, you really don't. Just get hit by a bot that reads ten pages a second, and your account will get suspended. That's happened a few times lately and I had to prove that I was getting hammered by bots and had to show that I was actually doing something about it. Usually, I just had to fine-tune the Blockscript.com dashboard.

I also keep a list of bad referrers to fight off referrer spam.

If you don't get the "zetz" from your host, you can get it from Amazon. They limit the amount of queries that you can make per hour. The limit is a function of how much revenue you drive. If the bots make you constantly reload your pages, you're going to use up all your Amazon queries pretty quickly.
Continue reading →

Posted in Amazon | Leave a comment

Fighting the Bots, Socially

Posted on June 13, 2011 by admin

If you make money with the Ebay Partner Network, then you know about fighting bad clicks. EPN has improved their click filtering over time, but as a site owner you've got do some of your own fighting.
Recently I came across a new service called AutoIpBlock.com. It allows you to share bad-bot info with other site owners across the web. It identifies bad bots based on overclicking, and stores the list in a central location, where your site can automatically download the list if there have been changes made. This means that you don't have to keep an eye on your QCT display to find bad IP addresses.
Continue reading →

Posted in Ebay Partner Network | 1 Comment

Webhost Recommendations

Posted on June 6, 2011 by admin

I occasionally get asked which webhosts I use, so I finally decided to write about my experiences.
I'm not a big WordPress or SQL user, so these issues weren't really a factor in my decisions. I like shared hosts where I can run multiple sites off a "central engine."
Since this is my livelihood, I try to avoid hosts with downtime problems. I need something that runs at almost 100%. I almost ditched JustHost, but they managed to solve their firewall problems and they've been running pretty smoothly for me lately.
The only server I ditched was one of those SEO hosting services spread over 5 IP's. The problem was reliability and I was also sharing the ip's with all kinds of dubious sounding domains. I was gone in about two months.

Continue reading →

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Always Test with Internet Explorer

Posted on January 17, 2011 by admin

I'm a fan of Firefox and I love their tabbed browsing. Having said that, most of the visitors to my sites use Internet Explorer. For that reason, I should be using IE for most of my site testing. Unfortunately, I wasn't and I found a bug/feature the other day, that may be costing me lots of money.
Continue reading →

Posted in Ebay Partner Network | Leave a comment

Adding the Groupon Geotargeting Widget

Posted on December 22, 2010 by admin

I just joined the Groupon affiliate program through CJ.
They have a geotargeted widget that updates daily.
I wrote a routine for the API folks:

function BuildGrouponWidget($API_key, $CjPid, $sColor)
{
$sResult = '<script type="text/javascript">' . "\n" .
'var _gwparam = _gwparam || [];' . "\n" .
'_gwparam["APIKEY"] = "' . $API_key . '";' . "\n" .
'_gwparam["size"] = "160.600.lofimulti";' . "\n" .
'_gwparam["location"] = "";' . "\n" .
'_gwparam["bgcolor"] = "' . $sColor . '";' . "\n" .
'_gwparam["title"] = "undefined";' . "\n" .
'_gwparam["PID"] = "' . $CjPid . '";' . "\n" .
'_gwparam["AID"] = "10817648";' . "\n" .
'</script>' . "\n" .
'<script id="grouponAd" type="text/javascript" src="http://www.groupon.com/javascripts/common/affiliate_widget/grouponwidget.js"></script>' . "\n" ;
} // BuildGrouponWidget

This lets you change the pid according to your sites, and also let's you adapt the color to your site's color scheme.
The API key is given by Groupon.

Unfortunately, here in Israel, my local site becomes Ft. Myers, Florida?!? I called my brother in Baltimore and he confirmed that it works for him.

Posted in Commission Junction | Leave a comment