e107 | Wordpress | Affiliate Marketing

Just a quick update on my e107 plugin that tries to recreate some not so easy content units.

I've got my first "content units" up on my find the cheapest netbook page. Kind of a beta really, just wanted to get something up now I have the feeds coming in.

Next development plans:

• Amazon feeds - needs special consideration as Amazon don't allow you to cache their data for >24 hours. I might set the links to "expire" if they are not refreshed
  
• More templates for the units, yes, the styling isn't great right now ;)!
  
• Port over to MediaWiki. This plugin runs off a CMS agnostic include file and runs happily in WP, I'd like to get it going in vbulletin and MediaWiki too so I can make use of it on SammyWiki

I have talked a number of times about the information that search engines do share with us and have tried to bust the myth that Google, Bing, etc are entirely secretive. Sure there is some stuff they don't give away to ensure that people can't use the knowledge to game the system, and I imagine some of it is also down to staying competitive and keeping their engines above the other providers.

However the big search engines really do share some interesting nuggets from time to time that will help us all to build better sites and, in this case, act as a warning against spam.

Futile Efforts
It amazes me that the spammers keep going and going, I guess it shows that they must have some success? But the question we should be asking is if the effort they put in provides a better ROI compared with simply building a good site in the first place?! With modern search engines just getting better and better at picking up these tricks it is hard to believe that it is worth the effort any more? But perhaps these people don't know any other way.

The following article from Bing talks about how they pick up on:

• Post web spam
  
• Link farming
  
• Link exchanges

And to think people are still scrabbling around for links via exchanges - isn't it time to move on? I've had my sites featured on blogs such as boingboing and slashdot etc, not because I offered them a link but because I built something that was worth linking to! The whole point of search engines using links to build their engines is that you aren't creating these yourself, if this was an easy thing to do then the value of this measure would drop away fast.

Anyway, good to see Bing sharing this info with us and let's hope it makes people think twice about using techniques that fell out of fashion years ago.

Following on from my previous post on trying to get across how SEO techniques are no secret and trying to share the idea that Google offer great resources to help beginners learn what they need to know, I wanted to share this great PDF from google.

This document puts together pretty much all any amateur website builder, or part time affiliate marketer really needs to know. Forget spending £100s on some course that will essentially share the same information, or worse still, will attempt to entice you into the world of "gaming" Google - which may have short term wins but why not just get it right once and then forget about it. If you follow Google's principles then you don't have to worry about updates to their engine. Each time the engine improves your site will stand a better chance of standing out.

Download the PDF here

It has been a long term annoyance of mine - this notion that optimising your site for the search engines is somehow a secret that only experts with years of industry experience can do. Companies charge 1000s for consultancy on SEO best practices so it must be some difficult hard to understand skill?

No. It's not hard. I work for one of the UKs leading consumer websites and we have a team of search guys and, no disrespect to them as it is still a job that needs to be done, I can see first hand that it isn't rocket science. All you need is common sense and the ability to read!

Want to learn more?
Google, the search Daddy, makes no secret of what they look for in a site. They want a page to be correctly tagged up, they want a page to be useful, they want it to say something. They want to be able to tell what the page is about.

They want other sites to vote for your site by linking to it, the more links from more respected sites the better. The idea behind this is that your site needs to be liked by lots of other people.



See, it's not hard!

Like I said before, Google make no secret of all this - all you need to do is read!

So the vbulletin community isn't too impressed with the bugs noted in vbulletin 4 so far. But anyway, I've fixed one that I had so I thought I would share it.



This arose from imported forum members having a birthday of "--". I simply updated this to be a blank string, ie "".



This problem was causing the user profile pages of these imported users to go all out of sync too. Hope it helps someone out there, and remember to pop by my vb forum and sign up if you own any Samsung stuff!