SEO

How High Can I get This Blog Post on Google Search?

graph

This is just a quick experiment to see where it will turn up on Google’s search results for ” How High Can I get This Blog Post on Google Search?”. It is not intended to be any kind of SEO trick or gimmick. There are no links going to it other than from this blog and I am not really trying to do any keyword stuffing either just writing a few paragraphs of whatever comes to mind.

If you have a unique title I think you can get to the top of the SERPS pretty easily. Not in all cases as on some long tail titles the engines will cherry pick a few keywords instead of using an exact match. Anyway after I post this I will add one link to the search query for the title and we can watch and see where it is and I will follow up with info in the comments section. Here goes….

Automating Google Webmaster Tools Validation (PHP)

webtools
In order to claim a website with Google’s Webmaster Tools you have to verify you own it or at least have access to the file system. In order to do so Google gives you a file to upload to the domains www directory that is something like this: google9bf026a5h34deb40d.html

It use to be this file was completely empty returning nothing. However this probably lead to some hacking abuse where certain websites were not properly configured to give an empty page for 404 (page not found.) It doesn’t take a genius to figure out such a website could easily be registered as your own as the call to the validation file would return exact what Google was looking for.

The validation file is no longer empty and Google won’t accept empty files they now must contain the following:

google-site-verification: google9bf026a5h34deb40d.html

You can see the name of the file is now part of the content which helps eliminate validation hijacking

Suppose you got a lot of Google friends or accounts that you want to allow to have access to your site with their webmaster tools. Updating their individual validation files can be a chore so here is an easy way to automate the process.

This example is not exact you will need to adjust it to your own needs.

First add a line in your .htaccess file.

RewriteRule ^google ([a-zA-Z0-9]+).html$ googlevalidateme.php?v=$1 [NC,L]

Then have a PHP program called googlevalidateme.php

<?php
echo 'google-site-verification: google'.$_REQUEST[v].'.html';

So with this example any calles to googlexxxx.html will pass xxxx as a value to googlevalidateme.php which will return the correct validation code for Google.

Of course you might want to improve this with a call to a master list someplace so that unwanted others can’t validate and spy on you.

Stop Giving Your Affiliate Link Juice

broken-link

It is no wonder that Amazon and other giant shopping sites that offer affiliate programs rank highest on search engines like Google. The associate that use the affiliate programs are helping drive those stores link popularity up by using the standard links which in turn hurts their own affiliate marketing strategies. There are easy ways you can implement linking to prevent sabotaging your own SEO.

The Problem

When you create a link that points to a product or the associated program for commission referrals, the search engines follow that link even if it is redirected by a 301 or other means. Even if you try and use Google’s “nofollow” rules the link is still observed as a pointer from your site to theirs. Even using a jump gate and robot.txt rules the search engines will still observe the outgoing link to the destination. When you have thousands of other associates using their own links to point to that same product then OF COURSE that drives the authority of the affiliate programs own page to the top of the search engine listings.

Then of course customers are not going to drill down several pages deep in search engine results to click on your link. That is if you get listed on the search engines at all with such tactics. It is counterintuitive to use such direct links for any type of reseller campaign.

The Solution

First you need to stop using the original manufacturer information supplied by the affiliate program for your affiliate link pages. When search engines see the exact same content on a thousand different pages then you will get very little traction if any. I will cover “content mutation” in a future article.

Addressing the problem with links and link juice pouring out of you page to the affiliate program you must eliminate the ability of the search engine to recognize and follow the actual link while not blocking your own web traffic from channeling through the link.

There are several different approaches that can be used, AJAX, Javascript, CSS Dom to name a few but the easiest is to simply use a POST form. Currently search engines such as Google do not try and press on form buttons and follow them, they are completely ignored, except in the case of simple action GET forms.

<form action="http://MY AFFILIATE LINK" method="POST">
<input type="submit" value="BUY NOW" />
</form>

This is not totally ideal as the link can still be picked up from the action tag, however not all affiliates will have the ability to add a jump gate, but it is better than nothing, it won’t be considered a hole in your page for link juice.

This is not totally ideal as the link can still be picked up from the action tag, however not all affiliates will have the ability to add a jump gate, but it is better than nothing, it won’t be considered a hole in your page for link juice.

A better solution is to use a simple jump gate that masks the URL, such as something like this.

<form action="jump.php" method="POST">
<input type="hidden" name="id" value="<?php echo base64_encode(http://MY AFFILIATE LINK); ?>" />
<input type="submit" value="BUY NOW" />
</form>

jump.php

<?php
header('Location: '.base64_decode($_REQUEST[id]));
exit;
?>