Affiliate networks like CJ use 302 redirects, even though they know that blocks the flow of PageRank to the merchant. And that's not going to change anytime soon -- if ever -- because the networks' loyalty is to the affiliates, not to the merchants. If merchants profited from affiliate links in terms of rankings improvements, the affiliates would not be happy. There would be mass revolt and a bunch of affiliates would leave the network. Luckily, for you merchants, there are a couple workarounds you could utilize to capture some link juice from your affiliates...

1. Bring your affiliate program in-house and utilize an affiliate tracking solution that uses 301 redirects and therefore passes PageRank. Here's a blog post of mine about this: Affiliate Programs That Pass Link Gain (PageRank). Amazon.com is one such merchant with an in-house affiliate program -- and it serves up 301s to capture PageRank from their "associates" (affiliates).
2. and/or, simply require your affiliates to post a disclosure statement on their Legal Notices page (or their About page if they don't have a Legal Notices page) stating that they are an affiliate of the merchant and that neither party is an agent, partner, joint venturer, franchisor, franchisee, employer or employee of the other. And of course require that the affiliate include a straight link to the merchant in that statement. Pretty sly, eh! And the great thing about a Legal Notices page is that it is typically linked site-wide and has very few other links on it compared to other pages, so your link gets a bigger slice of the PageRank that is divvied up among the links!

Bear in mind that affiliates can always add rel=nofollow to any and all links to the merchant, so the power still rests with the affiliates.

Big name companies often miss out on one of the basic concepts of SEO: Canonicalization, which means "identifying and consolidating to one, definitive source." How are they missing out? Grab a handful of your favorite companies and see whether or not they have a http://www.yourdomain.com and a http://yourdomain.com that leads to the same page. You'd be surprised how many "culprits" there are out there that don't have a 301 permanent redirect in place to preserve their home page's Page Rank. By having two sets of pages out there, it creates duplicate content because the search engines see pages based on their URLs. So instead of splitting your Page Rank between two, identical URLs, take control over your traffic and make sure you have a 301 permanent redirect in place.

For more on this topic, read my full post on my CNet: Searchlight blog.

If you are an SEO and you are not aware of Matt Cutts' strong opposition to buying links, you must have been living under a rock. However, my hunch is that most businesspeople (at least those who don't live and breathe SEO) are naive to Google's tough stance -- and to the risks!

My SEO How-To article in the January/February issue of Practical Ecommerce was meant to give ecommerce business professionals a (hopefully) balanced view of the risks and the opportunities of link buying. Before you have a go at link buying or selling you might want to give it a read.

What's tricky, even for seasoned SEOs, is figuring out if a site that's selling links has been made, and its voting power taken away by Google -- particularly if you aren't already advertising with the site. You can glean valuable clues by sizing up the existing advertisers and past advertisers (perusing previous versions of the site in The Wayback Machine). You can't tell by the PageRank score, or from the link: SERPs -- that would be too easy, and Google doesn't want to be that easy.

Of course, just because Google is talking tough about link buying/selling, the tactic isn't going to go away any time soon. It is a tactic that works. At least for as long as you stay under the radar!

And if you aren't convinced how well it works on Google, have a look at my SEO Report Card of Freshpair.com in the current issue of Practical Ecommerce, where I critique some of the backlinks purchased by aggressive link buyer Freshpair.com. It is always fun to reverse engineer an aggressive link buying campaign and this one was no exception. Hopefully I won't get too much hate mail from Freshpair for airing this in public! :-)

The fact that the top spot for the term "marketing" in Google goes to Wikipedia is an appalling fact that I will rant on another day. For now I want to rant about Google's "choice" of Bidvertiser.com as a top 10 site for the term "marketing".

Clearly the Bidvertiser.com site is not one of the 10 most valuable resources for marketing information on the Internet. Their home page's keyword focus doesn't even seem to be about "marketing" -- indeed the word isn't in the title tag or in the page copy. Yet it's currently #5 for marketing, at least according to the Google datacenter I'm being served results from.

So how did this happen?

A lot of it has to do with the clever (that's a euphamism for "sneaky") use of the NOSCRIPT tag. If you start analyzing the back links, the anchor text used in those links, and the placement of those inlinks, you will see that Bidvertiser has furnished their publishers with some HTML code and Javascript to place on their pages. And it just so happens that the HTML code comes with a text link hidden within a <noscript> container!

Any guesses on what one of those words in the hidden link might be? Yup. "Marketing". Here is what the hidden link looks like (this taken from binodc.com):

<noscript><a href="http://www.bidvertiser.com">affiliate program marketing</a></noscript>
Now binodc.com on its own doesn't have enough link importance to have much of an impact, but with all the publishers on Bidvertiser's network including this hidden link, you could see how this would sway Google. Some of these publishers may even be authority sites with a lot of trust built up (not to mention PageRank) and part of really good neighborhoods. I am rather astounded that Bidvertiser could occupy a top 10 spot for such a competitive term as "marketing", given that these links are hidden in noscripts and clearly not "earned" in the sense that a traditional link is. But there you have it, another Google loophole being exploited.

I haven't done the research to find which links I think are the vital few (versus the trivial many) that are pushing Bidvertizer into the top of the SERPs. But I do wonder if the publishers realize the value they are giving away to Bidvertiser without compensation. I'd guess it's without their knowledge or understanding.

I wonder how long it is going to take before Google discounts links wrapped within noscript completely. Until then, sites like Bidvertiser.com will be able to take advantage of their publishers and of the search engines, to the detriment of the user.

I blogged last month about Wikipedia and SEO. There are a number of considerations when making edits, creating entries, and passing the "Notability" test -- practices to avoid so you don't run afoul of their guidelines and so on.

Well folks, the game has changed. Wikipedia just instituted nofollows on all external links. This had already been in place for a while on some of their sister sites. This effectively removes a lot of the incentive to contribute to Wikipedia. Or does it? It does if your end goal is receiving PageRank to your own sites. But not if your goals are traffic (a top ranking Wikipedia page that links to you will still drive plenty of direct clickthrough traffic your way), credibility (companies with entries give the impression of being bigger and more legitimate), and reputation management (because a favorable Wikipedia entry for your company will probably occupy a spot in the top 10 in the SERPs for searches on your company name).

So are legitimate SEOs going to give up on contributing to Wikipedia? I hope not -- at least for the ones who are adding value to Wikipedia. I think we'd all like the spammers to leave (I certainly would!), and I know that is Jimbo Wales' intention, but I doubt that's what will transpire. Nofollowing blog comments didn't drive the spammers away; I can't see it working for Wikipedia. Especially as long as Wikipedia holds the top spot for important keywords such as "marketing" in Google. (sigh!)

More discussion on this development at SEOMoz.

Yay! It's another toolbar update underway, as I type!

"So what. Who cares?", you may be saying to yourself.

I'm not normally an obsessive PageRank Meter watcher, but I have been keeping a closer eye on it lately because a little technical snafu one of our junior developers made to our Netconcepts.com server config temporarily zereod out our score on the meter. But today it's back! We're a PR7 yet again.

If you're wondering what happened that we could zero out our PageRank score, here's the story... One of our programmers had mistakenly copied over a "bad bots" server configuration file (which includes email harvester bots and other such nasties) from a development server to our production server. What he didn't realize was that file was set to turn away Googlebot as a bad bot because we didn't want our development sites getting included in Google. This snafu happened a while ago now and it had long since been corrected. It didn't take long to notice something was amiss because pages started dropping out of Goog's index. After allowing Googlebot again, within a few days our pages returned to the index and our rankings returned too, but not our PageRank readout from the toolbar server... until now!

Note that our PageRank score as reported in the Google Directory has been unaffected. We've stayed at the top of our category page. Out of hundreds of web design agencies beginning with the letter N, no one has a higher PageRank than us (listings are in order of PageRank). (I know you're saying "Ooooh!!" to that! hehe). The reason for the lack of movement: The last Google Directory PageRank update was December 19 last year. (SEOcompany.ca estimated the next GDPR update would be March, but it still hasn't happened yet.)

So clearly PageRank updates to the toolbar server and to the Google Directory don't happen simultaneously. In fact, Google Directory PR updates generally happen less frequently than Toolbar PR updates, as you can see here.

Of course, both are months out-of-date so it's best not to base your business upon these readouts.

"For entertainment purposes only", as they say. ;-)

Link building is not all about transferring PageRank. Don't get caught in the trap of basing your decision on high PageRank score alone. There are other considerations to be taken into account.

For example, your backlinks need to represent a range of importance scores (PageRank) so that Google doesn't construe your link network as unnatural. Building links exclusively or mostly from high PageRank endowed sites may flag your site for artificially trying to boost your PageRank. And do you really want to attract additional scrutiny?

For long term benefit and security, sites that are selected for inbound links should be from an on-topic neighborhood, have aged domains, and if possible, have .edu and .gov sites in there. The list of sites needs to be analyzed to ensure that there are no technical limitations that slow the flow of "link gain" (e.g. PageRank). For example, the directory Gimpsy.com has let pages with session IDs ("PHPSESSID") in the URLs slip into the indices, which makes it less ideal as a backlink.

In general, all links help (unless from "bad neighborhoods"), regardless of their PageRank. Some of the links NEED to be topically-relevant or your site is going to appear unfocused and the links won't appear to have been "earned," but instead bought, borrowed, bartered or stolen.

Directory submissions should be a component of your link building strategy, but don't put too much emphasis on them. As Stuntdubl says, you need to balance the link equation and not rely too heavily on directories, and you need to spread your submissions out over time.

Certain directories are considered to be "hubs" or "authorities" or both (unfortunately only the search engines know which ones, so try to cover your bases as best you can), in which case it may be used by a search engine as an indicator of the topically-relevant neighborhood that your site belongs in.

Bear in mind that toolbar PR scores are months old and can't really be trusted. The REAL PageRank is outside of our grasp, locked up within the Googleplex.

Also bear in mind that PageRank is Google-specific. That's not to say that you can't use PageRank to make some inferences about the importance of a page in the eyes of Yahoo! and MSN Search. The concept of "link gain" or weighted link popularity is alive and well at Yahoo and Microsoft, they just have different ways of calculating it and names for it. At Yahoo it's been referred to as "Web Rank" and "link flux" (a term from their days at Inktomi). I don't know what MSN calls it. The higher the PageRank, the more useful it is as an indicator of a powerfully important site across all 3 engines. For example, I'd have little doubt that a PageRank 9 link would be an amazing link opportunity that would reap benefits across Google, Yahoo, and MSN Search.

I've produced my first screencast, using TechSmith's excellent software program Camtasia Studio. In it I show how to install and configure the Google Toolbar in the Firefox web browser to display PageRank scores on any web page that you visit. I also show how to change the display of the Toolbar and some other settings. If you don't have the Google Toolbar installed on your PC or Mac, this little 6 minute video will show you the process along with some of the benefits.

I'd love feedback on how to improve my screencasting. I intend to do quite a few more of these, so feedback early on will help ensure that these screencasts are the best they can be.

Note that I will be providing beginner, intermediate, and advanced level SEO tips and tricks. This particular one is beginner level.

Download the screencast as either a 5 megabyte WMV file or a 6 megabyte MPEG-4 file (iPod video compatible)

Most affiliate programs do not benefit search engine rankings because the link from the affiliate to the merchant doesn't count as a "vote." Thus, the merchant will not see a benefit in their Google PageRank and consequently in their search engine rankings. For example, any merchant using LinkShare or Commission Junction will not see such a benefit. That's because they all use temporary redirects, also known as 302 redirects. That type of redirect, which is the one programmers and site administrators tend to use by default, doesn't pass the link gain (e.g. Google PageRank) on to the target (final destination) URL. Only a very few affiliate management services allow the merchant to capitalize on the link gain of the affiliate. MyAffiliateProgram.com is one such affiliate solution. So I checked them out, and it turns out that it kinda works. Yes, kinda.

Here's the problem. The affiliate solution needs to use permanent redirects (a.k.a. 301 redirects) rather than temporary (302) ones. MyAffiliateProgram.com uses what they call "direct links." Here are a couple examples of affiliate-tracked direct links that they provided me to look at: http://www.myaffiliateprogram.com/?kbid=1001 or http://www.kitchen-universe.com?kbid=1001. But when you visit either of these 2 URLs, there is no redirect at all. Consequently, this creates lots of duplicate pages in Google when Googlebot finds these affiliate-tracked direct links and follows them. Taking the first URL as an example, if you search Google for site::www.myaffiliateprogram.com inurl:kbid you'll see 6,980 duplicate pages in Google. In other words, these are pages that were already in Google with URLs that don't have kbid= appended at the end.

Think about it this way: Yes, with MyAffiliateProgram.com a merchant will get PageRank flowing to all the links contained on the countless duplicates of the merchant's home page that are getting indexed. But because there is no 301 redirect present, MyAffiliateProgram has failed to collapse the link gain to one definitive version of the merchant's home page. Then search engine spiders come along and index all these versions of the merchant's home page which compete with the merchant's true home page (the one without any kbid=). Furthermore, searchers who click on listings in the search results that contain kbid= in the URL will get counted as referrals from the affiliate and the merchant will pay for that. Ouch!

So, buyer beware when shopping for an affiliate management service that passes PageRank to your site. The devil's in the details.

Any readers want to recommend affiliate solutions that do effectively pass link gain?

UPDATE: Just found this great blog post from Greg Boser that discusses this issue in more detail.

Got a new article out in the November issue of Multichannel Merchant... RSS Made Simple. The article is specifically targeted to online retailers. So if you're selling online and thinking of using RSS to help you sell more, this is the article to read!

Here's a small excerpt...

Key benefits of RSS to online merchants:

• Bypasses spam filters
• Encourages links and garners PageRank score
• Serves as a content delivery channel to your affiliates, giving them something they can republish on their own Websites
• Easy for your subscribers to manage communications from you without clogging up their inboxes
• Allows you to change content midstream (no need to push an “unsend buttonâ€? as with e-mail)
• Is the only way your blog can be included in Google's new Blog Search (http://blogssearch.google.com)
• Increases the likelihood of media coverage because RSS is a hot topic retailers are slow to embrace.

Read on...