Google & Affiliate Links

[pinman]

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Please be gentle with me as this is my first post

I started seriously dabbling with affiliate marketing at the start of the year, through making a discount voucher site (www.ddwt.co.uk) using Wordpress. So far so good 'ish.

I made sure I had a sitemap, meaningful headings, keywords, links from other sites, etc, etc. Things started off ok, I was getting around 50 - 100 UV's a day (peanuts I know, but a start nonetheless), but the last few weeks this has plummeted down to <10 UV's per day.

Reading around a bit, I found that perhaps foolishly I'd been using direct affiliate links for each post I made on the site, rather than using a redirect URL (from my domain). Consequently I *think* this is the reason for the sudden downturn in traffic (as the content is the same as before).

I suppose I'm now curious as to how to alleviate this problem quickly? I've started changing my affiliate links, etc, but how long will Google (in particular) rank me down for?

I'd be grateful for any advice or observations relating to my 'Money Off Shop' - www.ddwt.co.uk

[tbp]

Theres a lot of debates about Affiliate links, some people think it affects Googles ranking, others day it doesn't make a difference.

It may just be a case of the sites age. Frequently Google adds a new site to the top of the rankings, and then after a while it falls back to its natural position.

I did try and go to your site, but the link was coming up with a page not found.

To be honest, you've chosen a really difficult area to start with. There are huge numbers of discount voucher sites now, and the market is pretty much dominated by the well established sites that have been around for years. In Googles terms, it's going to be very difficult to get a new site to the top of the rankings, displacing one of the established ones with a decent PR and a large number of backlinks.

It's not impossible though, but it will take a LOT of time and work. What I would do is to carry it on as a long term project, but start up some niche sites as well. These are much easier to rank, as by definition a niche means there isn't much competition. Use these to give yourself an income while you are building up your discount site.

In a lot of cases, time is a healer for sites like yours. I had a site which was a shopping directory in the gifts market. Like you I went into Google high and was really pleased, but then dropped back to nowhere after about a month. I struggled to try and get it ranking as I`d put a huge amount of work into it and didn't want to lose all that. In the end I decided to cut my losses, and essentially abandoned it while I went and made some good money with niche sites. However, last christmas, when the site a year old it made a jump at the rankings, and now ranks well for one of it's key terms. As there was no new content or changes in the previous 6 months, the age of the domain was the main contributing factor. Googles sees a huge number of new sites launched daily, most are spam to try and make a quick buck, and these normally have a fairly short lifespan. As a result, in competitive areas, the age of a site works against you as you need to "prove" yourself to google that you are in it for the long term, and not going to pack up tomorrow.

Don't give up on it, there are other ways of getting traffic such as links from other sites. Just keep building it up and working on it, and eventually you will get rewarded. Do build some other sites though in less competitive areas, and these will bring you an income quicker to see you through.

[pinman]

tbp - thanks for taking the time to give such an in-depth response, it's much appreciated

In retrospect, as you rightly say I've probably chosen one of the worst possible 'guinea pig' sites to get started on - but I won't give up and it's proved its worth to date in terms of a learning experience alone.

Typical as well that on the one night I choose to seek advice, my hosting lets me down

Cheers again

[tbp]

but I won't give up and it's proved its worth to date in terms of a learning experience alone.

Yes definately, and Im not encouraging you to give it up. Just saying that you should build some other sites to bring some money in in the meantime.

Can be very demoralising when you build a big site, put a ton of work into it, and don't make much off it for months. I had this with mine and it's tempting just to give it up. Once I built some other sites and started earning from them, it reawakened my interest and kept me going.

[pinman]

Time to get my thinking cap on then and think of some niche areas - which hopefully I also have an interest in and knowledge of.

Well at least my hosting (Lunarpages) seems to be back up now if you'd like to take a look at the site? Money Off Shop

[tbp]

For niche sites, use the Google external keyword tool, and plugin keywords you know something about hobbies etc. Then plug the returned words back into google to scope out the competition.

Because there are so many things you could do a site about, i've found it's a lot easier than I thought to find niches. I`ve got so many domains now I haven't got enough time to develop them all!

Make sure that the domain you buy is the same as the keyword you are targeting, as for niche sites that is one of the most important things for ranking.

Had a look at your site, and it looks good. The source code is very busy though, which is one of the downsides of wordpress. As a result, the amount of source code dilutes your keyword strength. One way round this is to put all the definitions to include other files into 1 external file. So you include one file, and then that file includes all the others.

Another thing is that at the moment, the H1 tag for every page is the name of your site. This is fine for the homepage, but for each post I would put the title of the post in the H1 tag instead, telling google its most relevant for that page. You`ll have to have a fiddle with your wordpress template, but it's not too difficult to do.

[pinman]

Thanks for all of the advice tbp

You've given me plenty of food for thought and some key pointers as well for future reference.

It's all very much appreciated and I'm glad I asked the question(s) now.

[tbp]

No problem, I'm glad I could help, and good luck with your site(s)

[JamesEvansSEO]

Internal link structure (build a huge site) + the right anchor text + build huge sites pointing to your site (using more anchor text) + some directories, articles, press releases, social boomarking... mix it and wait some weeks, as simple as that... there is not "black magic" behind. ...but I'm talking about thousand to millions of back links (not all of them get indexed but if you get a rate of 20% of success you could get 200,000 backlinks easily - of course you need to know what you are doing).

James

[gadget]

Make use of the numerous WP plugins. Start with the All-in-One SEO plugin and set-up a 'title' meta with keywords like discount, codes etc.