Googlebot Behaviour

Ever had trouble understanding Googlebot’s behaviour or how to best implement a robots.txt file? A week ago, Vanessa Fox answered questions about Googlebot’s behaviour on Webmaster Central. Here are a few of the things I learnt. If your site is down for maintenance you may be worried that Googlebot will index your “Down for Maintenance” page. Let Googlebot know to rather try the pages later by simply configuring your server to return a status of 503 (network unavailable) instead of 200 status (successful). While some have trouble getting Googlebot to crawl their site at all others may suffer from their site being crawled too much. If you are the later, Vanessa Fox says you just need to contact Google and they will make sure they don’t overwhelm your server. She mentioned that Google are looking on bringing out a new feature on webmaster tools that’ll allow you to provide input on your crawl rate. Should you want to prevent Googlebot from crawling a number of pages, place those pages in a single directory (if possible) and use a robots.txt file to block those pages. You can also use META tags but those are for single pages. Any questions on Google’s behaviour? Join our SEO forum. You can read the full Q & A post by Vanessa Fox on Webmaster Central.

Best Affiliate Marketing For Your Needs

Today Affiliate Marketing programs are more popular than ever before. I believe the success of Affiliate Marketing is due to the win-win nature of the program for both merchant and the affiliate. For the merchant, Affiliate Marketing is a more affordable way to advertise their products direct to their target audience. As for the affiliate, they can earn money easily by just adding a link to the merchant on their site. Now there are thousands of different types of Affiliate programs out there today. But which is best for you? Let us take a look at a few of the most popular Affiliate programs. Pay Per Click (PPC) PPC Affiliate Marketing has been around for years and is probably the most used. The affiliate will place a link on their site to the merchant’s site. Every time a visitor clicks on that link, the affiliate will be paid a certain amount. Even though the typical PPC fee is small, this is a good way for smaller Affiliate websites to earn money. Pay Per Performance (PPP) In PPP Affiliate Marketing, the affiliate is only paid if the visitor performs a certain action such as buying a product or filling out a form. This form of Affiliate Marketing is beneficial to the merchant as he doesn’t need to worry about click fraud. The affiliate also has a chance of earning a greater amount than with PPC, as they could be paid a percentage fee of the product sold. Pay Per Sale (PPS) PPS Affiliate Marketing is an off shoot of PPP. This is where the affiliate is paid fee (either set or percentage) for every purchase a referred visitor makes. Pay Per Lead (PPL) PPL Affiliate Marketing is also an off shoot of PPP, and similar to PPS. This method is usually used by merchants in finance or insurance field. With PPL, an affiliate is paid a set fee for every visitor that results in the company growing. Usually this is when a visitor completes an application form. Single Tier Affiliate Marketing All the above Affiliate Marketing types fall into the Single Tier Affiliate Marketing type. Two / Multi Tier Affiliate Marketing Two Tier Affiliate Marketing is not just when the affiliate (let’s call him affiliate 1) is paid for direct traffic / sales they refer. The affiliate (affiliate 1) is also paid for direct traffic / sales referred from another affiliate (affiliate 2) that joined the merchant’s affiliate program via (affiliate 1). To discuss this article, leave a comment here or join our SEO discussion forum.

Essential to SEO – Users’ Search Habits

Last week we wrote an article Online Privacy Threat caused by AOL’s release of search information on 650,000 of its users. Let’s see some of the interesting statistics Lee Gomes wrote about for The Wall Street Journal Online. The most common word used in the searches was “free” followed by “new”. Not including proper nouns, the next most used words where "lyrics," "county," "school," "city," "home," "state," "pictures," "music," "sale," "beach," "high," "map," "center" and "sex". The 17th most popular search term was “Google” In Gomes’s research, 14% of all users conducted searches for explicit sexual search terms. There where 50,549 searches for nude pictures. Surprisingly “Pamela Anderson” was only second on the list. She was booted out of her long-standing first place by “Peter Wentz” of the group Fall Out Boy. What is interesting is that 47% of these nude celebrity searches did not result in a click. It seems not all users are finding precise results first time round with 28% of all searches being refinements of earlier searches. Good news for companies’ spending money on Search Engine Optimisation strategies. The quest for 1st place rankings in AOL is well worth the effort. 42% of clicks made, were made on the first result, and it’s likely that this statistic applies to the other major search engines too. Gomes found that 413,638 searches were questions. With these searches only around 35% of users clicked on any of the results. When doing searches for URLs, 15% of users include the full domain name, including “http” and “.com”. Some other interesting searches include 3,938 searches for “Britney Spears” but only 3.279 for “God”. 1,881 searches for “Madonna” and only 165 for “Mother Teresa”. There were no searches for any modern writers. View Lee Gomes’s original article on The Wall Street Journal Online or join our Search Engine Discussion Forum to discuss search habits and other factors that affect Search Engine Optimisation.

Online privacy threat

Two weeks ago AOL, a Google search customer, accidentally released information on 20 million keyword searches by its customers. While online marketers who’ve managed to download this keyword list are pleased to have valuable information on search habits, many are worried about the implications on online privacy. In one case a New York Times journalist tracked down Thelma Arnold. Internet user number 4417749 (assigned to protect privacy) was identified by analysing her searches of the past three months. On Wednesday, Google Inc’s CEO Eric Schmidt, stated that Google has taken all necessary measures to insure users’ personal data is protect from theft or accidental release. Schmidt has said that potential demands by governments to disclose information on users’ surfing habits is a more serious threat to online privacy than accidental release. Earlier this year Google went to court to block a request by US government for data on Google’s users. AOL apologised on Monday for the accidental release and has launched an internal probe into the matter. This data is currently circulating on the Internet, with a few people using the information to create free online keyword research tools. Have your say on online privacy with our search engine forum.