If you’re relying on organic traffic generation methods, especially from the search engines, there have been recent developments which may cause a change in your strategy.

Some of these include:

• The Rise of Blackhole Seo
• Changes in ranking alogorithmn like Google PageRank (a number of websites and blogs saw their PR score drop by 1 or more in recent weeks) and Alexa rankings have fluctuated greatly since the system was change a number of months ago
• Looming changes Google plans to or has implemented since as lower weightage given to directory links (thanks Wil Reynolds for the heads-up), including paid Yahoo directory submissions.

Which can be like an earthquake sending ripples through your business and earnings if you’re not prepared.

I was speaking with Geordie Carswell, former RevenueWire CEO who’s now involved with his own affiliate marketing projects and his business is thriving, despite the negative indicators about the economy.

In most cases, even with the drop from Google’s PR and dip in Alexa rankings, traffic and conversion levels still remain strong within my websites.

In almost all cases, launching a new campaign or creating a new product will more than offset any hits (real or imagined) that arose because of a change in the search engine algorithmn.

The challenge in being a successful online marketer lies in being able to adapt to change and more importantly, staying ahead of the curve.

By adding new tactics and new strategies to what you’re already doing, you can more than overcome any negatives in the present or the future.

Obviously, an auction site (or “digital marketplace” if you prefer that term, publishing blog posts about content publishers generating affiliate income is going to draw some interest.

eBay, from my experience, has taken a fairly non-supporting position towards affiliate marketers on it’s network, so seeing them point to Brian “Copyblogger” Clark’s posts is refreshing.

Except, instead of pointing at Brian’s post “Why Affiliate Marketing Will Save Free Online Content“, the eBay blog post points at his feedburner feed, the pretty obscure “http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Copyblogger/~3/274785900/”

Which is one step forward by giving support for free online content, supported by affiliate marketing, but on the other hand, slaps this free online drive, by denying link juice so Brian’s blogpost will rank higher in the search engine results.

On the other hand, it could be an intern or uninformed blogger over at eBay who pulled the link off Brian’s RSS feed and simply published it on the blog. But really, if it was an oversight, shouldn’t a company which generated net income of $460 million on revenue of $2.2 billion for the 2nd quarter ended June 30, 2008, know better?

Some bloggers won’t care about search engine positions, while others (myself included) will use linkbuilding as part of our traffic generation strategy.

While it’s nice to get some referred traffic through the citation in a blog post, since bloggers are providing high quality content worth linking to, shouldn’t the aggregator give a direct, followed link to their source too?

In the journalism world, we’ve a standing practise to cite source and give credit and attribution when using an expert source. Although recent talks with Michael Gray AKA GrayWolf, seems to indicate that it’s a whole new ballgame when you’ll look at the online world.

What do you think?

What is Blackhole SEO anyway?

As described by BlueHat SEO Eli, it’s where link authority AKA ‘link juice’ is trapped within a site and the outgoing link authority is severely capped or restricted altogether.

In layman’s language, it’s a site which happily accepts your backlinks, but holds back the goods when it comes to linking out to other sites.

The consequence? You’ll rank lower in Google’s search results and these blackhole SEO sites will bubble up to the top or get more firmly entrenched, if they are already there.

Blackhole SEO is achieved by the use of “no follow” tags or by directing links to an internal page, like a resources, reference, glossary or database/encyclopedia page like the TechCrunch Crunchbase.

The blackhole sucks linkjuice and doesn’t send much, if any, of it out.

Among the named suspects – the New York Times, TechCrunch and Wikipedia.

What does this mean for internet marketers?

Offsite SEO efforts will be restricted by these blackhole practises and has Seer Interactive’s Adam Melson’s wondering if Facebook is stealing your hard-earned earnings?

Likewise, Quadzilla defines a black hole and gives you some ideas for rolling your own blackhole.

Unsure of whether to try to beat them or join them? Aaron Wall lists the pros and cons of blackhole SEO.

In the final analysis, you might be wondering about the implication of being able to build link authority for your own sites, especially as more high authority/high trustrank sites start implementing this insidious site structure into their business operating model.

For user content generated sites like Wikipedia, will there be as great an incentive to provide quality content if you will be denied a linkback to your site?

The situation is far from being resolved, but the wave of discontent is certainly starting to build.

Stay tuned for more developments.

Affiliate Summit co-founder Shawn Collins recently uploaded Wil’s slides from his presentation together with other presentations and they can be access here: Affiliate Summit East 2008 presentation slides.

From his “My Favourite 5 SEO Strategies Exposed” session, one of the items Wil talked about was Google’s recent Knol, or knowledge aggregation site.

Located at Knol.google.com, the site seems like a combination of Squidoo in that users can create topic-focused resource pages, with the authority of a Wikipedia.

Knol pages have ranked prominently in Google’s results, such as Aaron Wall’s recent experiment with Search Engine Optimization.

The pages (highlighted in red above) provide opportunity for outbound links, with Wil mentioning the following factors:

And the following factors affecting Knol page ranking:

In addition Wil provides a more tips for refining your Google Knol by using Aaron Wall’s Rank Checker together with other tools like Google Trends, editing your Knol regularly and leaving it open to editing by others.

2 other SEO resources that Wil went into detail for fine tuning your SEO efforts were:

Link Diagnosis:

Link Diagnosis seems to operate on the Yahoo! Search API. During my trial with it, it seemed to take some time and the job didn’t complete. More testing due in time.

The other resource is SEOQuake, which I’ve blogged about before.

Wil goes into detail into how you can use these 2 tools in his presentation.

For more details, visit the ASE08 Presentations Download page.

If it’s anything like previous Affiliate Summits, Shawn might have the videos up in due course.

Recently, Laura has been more proactive moving from the forum management/marketing side of things to becoming a SEO evangelist of sorts.

She recently organized an Austin SEM meetup, with a presentation on local search (aka geotargeted search engine optimization).

Optimizing your website for local traffic, especially if you’re mainly a geographically-fixed business like a hair salon or ice cream parlor can pay off with big dividends regardless of whether you go down the free search engine optimization route or the paid search route.

A number of factors work in your favor:

• Highly relevant and targeted traffic since the campaigns specially target consumers with specific needs
• Generally lower bids, as the pool of advertisers is smaller (even in a metropolitan area like New York City or Los Angeles – it’s a more viable prospect compared to facing bidders all over the world)
• Higher conversion ratios
• Ease-of-followup and greater opportunities to build a continuing relationship (especially if you employ email marketing and/or direct mail in your customer relationship management efforts)

Obviously SEM/SEO is not going to be your end point, it’s merely going to be your start point to generate leads. Building the relationship and establishing trust, credibility, asking for the sale and asking for the repeat sale are going to be the bedrock of your business building efforts.

For the local SEO side, here’re some slides from Laura’s presentation:

3 formats for localized SERP (search engine results page) display:

10 Pack

Authoritative OneBox

Integrated Map

I remember getting a set of highly relevant local results when looking for a shooting range near the hotel where Affiliate Summit West was held in Las Vegas earlier this year. The localized search result with map and local landmarks give a much better user experience. If I had more time, I probably would’ve headed over to the range.

You can check out Laura’s local search slide presentation and writeup.

If you’re located near Austin TX, you might also like to sign up for Laura’s Austin SEM group.

While not going into the specific nuts-and-bolts factors influencing SERPs (or search engine results pages), Amit outlined a number of broad principles to keep in mind when optimizing your web pages.

Principle 1: “Best locally relevant results served globally”

As I’ve earlier noted, your geographic location, specifically your IP number can determine the search results returned.

Amit’s assurance that they operate on the “no query left behind” principle, meaning every user query gets the most relevant results, is yet another assertion that the “user experience” more so than the affiliate marketer, SEO or even adwords advertiser’s interest is given priority.

If you’ve been following developments (and educated guesses) in the SEO field, you’ll know that meta criteria like “time on site” and other deeper level criteria from Google Analytics (and no doubt, Google own deeper level analytics, and possibly algorithms derived from basic analytics) are being incorporated into these ranking factors.

I applaud the SEOs who’re on the leading edge in following and sometimes trying to step ahead of Google to rank higher in the SERPs. For the average internet marketer, developing a long term sustainable business model and providing original, quality, link worthy content is probably the best route for now.

Principle 2: Keep It Simple

What’s simple to a UC Berkeley or Carnegie Mellon comp sci major might be rocket science to the average man.

Again, the average man-in-the-street marketer is going to be hard pressed to come up with anything innovative, unless you’ve got the technical chops of a BlueHat SEO with his madlib and deeplinking strategies.

As Google has mentioned in its Quality Guidelines, using off-the-shelf software can lead to detrimental results in your rankings (disclaimer: unless you have the technical knowhow to understand the system, rather than keying in your URL and hitting the submit button).

Principle 3: No Manual Intervention

What’s interesting is that the ranking team is making about 10 changes to the algorithm each week, which accounts for the fluctuations in SERP positions (in addition to data from spider data).

Here’s the double-edged sword for marketers and business owners “Improving the underlying algorithm not only improves that one query, it improves an entire class of queries” – Which explains the phenomenon where a crackdown on MFA (made-for-adsense) sites also takes down legitimate sites – because of a rule-based algorithm. The “trick” is figuring out how to stay on the right side of big G and benefitting from the changes.

Which isn’t difficult if you approach building your online business just like a brick-and-mortar business – based on solid fundamentals, with a long term view and on a sustainable basis.

For “Andrew Wee” from a Singapore IP, here’s the result:

But if I do the same search using a US IP:

Spot the difference?

The expanded listing you see above are what Google calls “Sitelinks”

Some have said sitelinks could be an indicator of your site’s status as an authority site in Google’s eyes.

If that’s true, it makes sense, because about 70-80% of my traffic comes from the US, while about 10% comes from Singapore.

So traffic weightage plays a part in the display of sitelinks.

Back in her Google Webmaster Central days, Vanessa Fox notes that the sitelinks are generated according to an algorithm.

Another finding seems to be that Google is serving up different results depending on your geographic origin. If you’re a major US player, the display of sitelinks might not hold for someone coming from Japan or the UK.

Some interesting food for thought in your site planning efforts.

We were talking about how paid search and organic search were converging, and the role of search engine optimization, even for PPC marketers.

Some examples of the convergence of SEO and PPC:

You can study your top converting PPC keywords and develop content pages based around them to attract organic traffic. (One of the strategies that Aaron Wall mentions in SEO Book).

In addition, I use the reverse method: Looking at the high traffic (and more importantly, converting!) keywords from either my AWStats account or Google Analytics from my niche blogs or HTML content sites, and creating PPC campaigns based on them (Highly targeted traffic mechanisms like Google Adwords Placement Targeting tool -formerly known as site-targeting – let you take a crack at attracting traffic with sniper-like accuracy).

So with PPC-SEO convergence, it’s very much a 2-way street.

Some highlights from Wil:

Diversify to break out of what everyone else is doing: Most affiliates will use 1 or 2 keyword tools in their research process. Wil uses 7 or 8. He might have as many as 17 tabs open on his browser during the research process.

Some of the tools he uses includes:

• Microsoft AdLab
• Yahoo Site Assist (Google for it..ironically it’s a search engine UNFRIENDLY URL)
• eBay Pulse

And if you’ve been keeping up with SEO developments, you’d know that searcher mindset and intent are going to be key.

So in line with what I’ve been doing in demographic/psychographic profiling, Microsoft’s AdLab will not just let you harvest your visitors keywords, it will give you tools to understand the demographics – age, sex, education, location of your visitors.

Together with tools like Google Trends, and Quintura (useful for lateral keyword/thematic research), you can build a pretty comprehensive profile.

–

I predict that going forward, smart affiliates are going beyond merely harvesting converting keywords in a product-centered model, and move closer to the visitor in a consumer-centered model.

To some it may not be an obvious difference yet, but it’s going to be something that separates the Super Affiliates from the regular affiliates, as PPC bid prices and organic search algorithms continue to weed out the weaker players from the market in a Darwinian game of “search engine evolution”.

The partial update to visible PageRank that went out a few days ago was primarily regarding PageRank selling and the forward links of sites. So paid links that pass PageRank would affect our opinion of a site.

Going forward, I expect that Google will be looking at additional sites that appear to be buying or selling PageRank. 

So if you’re selling links, kiss PageRank goodbye.

This would be a good move to shift more human relevant content into the SERPs, although without visibility of it’s PR algorithmn, it’s difficult to judge how a site providing quality content can justify the provision of free content WITHOUT advertising as a revenue stream.

Has Google’s quality score grown to encompass the quality and sophistication of site content?

Or will it be some time before a comprehensive content ranking system makes it’s way into the PageRank system.

–

On the bread-and-butter side of things, I certainly don’t believe that any entrepreneur’s business should be held sway to the whim of a single number…

How much does PageRank really mean, other than “PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value.”

Uh huh…Having the monetization of your site held hostage by Larry, Sergei…or even Jerry Yang is certainly an indication that you’re going about things in the wrong way.

If you’re in this position, you certainly need to take an in-depth look at your business, and make it three-dimensional in terms of marketing and monetization, way beyond the one-dimensional reliance on PageRank.

Take it as a wake up call to figuring out the ingredients to generating a substantial income online.

Seer Interactive’s Wil Reynolds

One of the presenters, Seer Interactive’s Wil Reynolds didn’t fail to shine as always with his “SEO For the New Google / Yahoo! / MSN” presentation (somewhat wordy, but chock full of content as usual).

No word yet on whether Shawn will have the videos up, but you can download Wil’s presentation PDF.

Here’s what you might have missed:

An evolution of search engine ranking strategies from past to present. From the early days of meta tag keyword stuffing to the evolution to linkbaiting / sticky content now.

Wil’s advice?

Drop the tech-focused hard approaches to SEO and adopt a human-relevant relevancy approach, and the focus on business revenue (and ultimately, profit) should stand you in good stead too.

The relevancy theme should be no surprise, with a theme-based approach making for a tight silo approach to site construction (building on the hierarchical vs spoke site architecture Wil spoke about during Affiliate Summit East earlier in the year)

Assets too will play a vital part in your site ranking strategy. Think relevance and providing value to visitors and readers:

If you need a primer on assets, check out my earlier post “Building Your Internet Marketing Asset Base”

Besides building your assets, you need to know how to effectively utlize them as well, this is where your skill as a marketer and a social networker (the human interaction side of Web2.0) comes in.

What I found particularly was this heatmap Wil included:

You might not be able to see this, but assuming the heatmap is labelled from hot (the most popular) to the coolest, in order of popularity, the hottest are:

• Video result (with thumbnail): Result #2
• Organic search result #1
• Organic search result #3
• Paid Search ad block (positioned above the organic results)

This is a quantifiable study that demonstrates SEO gives a higher return compared to PPC (at least for the terms you dominate the SERPs with).

You can install a similar heatmap using Neil Patel and Cameron Olthuis’ CrazyEgg service.

For more Affiliate Summit London presentations, you can check out the Affiliate Summit newsletter.

Now keep your fingers crossed that Shawn will upload the videos…

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For more insights, visit Seer Interactive and check out the Seer Interactive blog.

Wil is founder of Philadelphia-based SEO firm Seer Interactive and he focuses on marketing, SEO and analytics.

There’re a number of what I call SEO Snake’s Oil salesmen out there who will claim to help you rank for 1,000 keywords, but Wil has a caveat empor warning for those who might fall prey to these ruses:

I have been reading of instances in which some dubious SEOs will help you rank for terms like “divorce lawyer outrageous settlement los angeles”. But seriously, what’s the likelihood of someone typing something like that?

As Wil cautions:

He also highlights the danger of using just a single keyword tool, for example Google Trends for research into “shox” and “Nike Shox”:

While another tool might give you vastly different results:

“Nike shox” is marked in yellow, while “shox” is marked in blue.

Most affiliate marketers and those involved in affiliate marketing might not spend too much time thinking about your site architecture, but it can make a difference in your ranking in the SERPs (search engine results pages).

Here are 2 models, Wil’s presented:

The hierarchical and wheel/spoke site architecture will have vastly different implications on your rankings:

And he highlights the need for a multi-tier site architecture for page importance weightage:

He also provides a number of linking strategies:

Emphasizing the fact that the ultimate aim of SEO is to build a human-usable site:

You can download a PDF of Wil’s “SEO Site Critiques” presentation.

Shawn has mentioned that the ASE videos will be available sometime in the near future, so you can catch Wil’s presentation then.

Witness the case of musician “AM”, who gave up his given name and goes by his initials and has been lost in the search engine results pages. (Wall Street Journal “You’re Nobody Unless Your Name Google Well“)

AM probably has lost countless sales due to fans landing on the pages of AM radio stations or American Greetings Corp (stock ticker: AM). Appearing on page 20 of the search results could spell online death.

You could counter this in a number of ways.

Increase your search engine prominence by:

• Blogging
• Submitting articles and press releases
• Creating Squidoo lenses
• Being active on social bookmarking/social community sites

But if you were active on the social traffic generation front, I’ve found that social media crosses over to search engine results fairly easily too.

That means without much conscious effort, I rank top for the SERPs for “Andrew Wee“, out of 1.28 million results.

Being easy to find means affiliate marketers, joint venture partners and most importantly, customers will be able to find you easily.

If they can’t locate you, they certainly can’t buy from you!

David Utter over at WebProNews mentions that “Parents Obsessed with Baby Names” and the “googleability” of their kids name. It may smack of a weird parental obsession, though as a parent myself, I’m somewhat glad that my daughter ranks tops for “Bianca Wee” out of 254,000 results.

Now it’s time to develop her Bianca Wee Baby and Toddler blog.

True, they are able to provide a breadth of information that runs into the hundreds of millions of results. But at the same time, how many are truly relevant to the one result you’re looking for.

Sometimes due to reasons of ultra efficient search engine optimization, the most relevant result might be located on page 5 or 6 of the search engine result pages. Finding that metaphorical needles in the haystack tends to lead to frustration, and in the worst case scenario, not finding the information you’re looking for.

Enter the “Human Search Engines”.

While we might not contain the breadth of knowledge that might be contained in a search engine’s databases, we contain one critical factor: relatedness.

Looking up a new concept in the search engine might be analogous to looking up the spelling for an unfamiliar word in the dictionary.

If you don’t know how to spell it, how do you look it up?

When you’re talking to a fellow human, you can describe the concept in abstract terms and they might be able to synergize the bits of information you feed them and give you the answer you’re looking for.

Humans organized by concepts, somtimes involving negative concepts (what a thing is not), while search engines aggregate collections of related words – keywords and keyphrases.

When encountering something new to which you have no idea how the concept (for example social media optimization) is organized, perhaps the means when starting out might be to refer to high authority blogs and websites, to gain an abstract idea of the concept.

By reading news and pieceing together facts from anedotes stories like jigsaw pieces, our mind also functions as an organic conceptual engine, synergizing the isolated facts into a cohesive whole.

It will be sometime before the search engine’s fuzzy logic algorithmns can effectively mimic this ability.

From our hazy understanding of a new concept, we can then gather together a list of keywords and keyphrases, then go to the search engines to gather further information.

With search engines being more dynamic and real-time compared to encyclopedias, this would naturally lead to a more active learning model, especially for the young.

With the Internet and search engines playing an increasingly important role in educational institutions, will this model of education eventually come to be known as Learning 2.0?

Only time will tell.

Doing a search for “affiliate marketing” shows the Wiki entry at the top position for the organic results.

Should Wiki entries be so dominant? Especially as the members of the SEOmoz team point out other high authority sites might provide more comprehensive and relevant information?

As Shoemoney pointed out in his posts Google Video #1 Rank – What Kind Of Traffic Does It Bring? and Top Commentors MyblogLog Integration, the evolution of alternative high authority, high traffic sites like Google Video and MyBlogLog can bring huge amounts of traffic.

Now think about Wikipedia, which generates loads of traffic, coupled with it’s dominance at the SERPs. Can you imagine how a well-placed Wiki can drive hordes of qualified, focused traffic to a site?

A good podcast to kick off SEOmoz’s series (I believe they’re planning another 4).

I liked the content and it’s great to put a face to the team.

My feedback consists of two points:

• Tighter framing

I’m a fan of closely cropped photos and videos, which draw your eyes to the focus of attention. I’d probably have framed the shot like this:

• Publicly Hosted Bugbears

As with all hosted video services, the service will attempt to serve up relevant video content. At the end of this clip, the following “related” clips popped up:

While the “Shoe Shop prank” and “Mixed Armwrestling” clips might be irrelevant to Wikipedia and Google rankings, they could be good for a laugh.

Having “Cheating Wife” served up (even if it’s a joke clip), tends to detract from the informational nature of the clip.

The alternative would be to host the clips on a dedicated server, though the potential bandwidth resources would escalate exponentially, especially if the post ranks high on Digg and other services.

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While you’re over at SEOmoz, you might like to check out Matt Inman and Rand’s Page Strength tool.

The purpose of the tool as listed is to:

I ran the tool on this domain and got the following summary:

Accompanying the summary is a comprehensive set of information, including dominance in the search engines, backlinks, link from .edu and .gov domains (I was surprised to see my blog listed at: Online gaming: Moral panic in Singapore), internal site links and others.

You can see the Page Strength results for WhoIsAndrewWee.com.

And the Page Strength tool can be found here.

In the works too are a variety of interesting SEO-related tools, I’m sure it’ll be worth checking out once they’re launched.

I checked my Live PR at the Google datacenters:

My Google Toolbar PR displays a 3, though it may be headed to a PR5 at the end of this exercise. Some of my other sites look like they may be moving up a notch.

This is encouraging because I’ve mostly focused on a content-based approach (except for a brief period where I felt I was excessively focused on meta and H1 and H2 optimization). Looks like the organic route has worked out well.

If you’re like to check the Live PR for your sites from the Google Datacenters, check out the following:

• iWebtool PageRank Check

• Live PageRank

It looks like the PR score that iWeb reports from toolbarqueries.google.com might give you the PageRank that’s displayed on your toolbar.

Did your PageRank change? Share your results in the comments.