Keyword sniping is a phrase coined by Courtney Tuttle to target keywords by making the whole site optimised for 1 or 2 keywords. If you haven’t seen Court’s post on this head over to Introduction to Keyword Sniping. Most sites will optimise a page for a keyword, by optimising the whole site you can, in theory rank well for much more competitive keywords. I was very impressed with this method which is very clearly explained by Court so I’ve set up a couple of sites to see how it goes. I’ve also tried to keep the cost down as much as possible by using free software (WordPress and WordBay) and submission services when possible.
I won’t explain the whole method here, Court does a very good job of that, instead I’ll document what I have done to test this method and report on my results. Continue reading ‘Experiment in Keyword Sniping’
Table of contents for Keyword Sniping Experiment
- Experiment in Keyword Sniping
As my regular readers will know my best performing BANS sites have been sandboxed by Google. Sandboxing (as opposed to de-indexing) is when Google decides to dump most of your pages in the supplemental index and/or relegate all your best keywords to the millionth position in SERPS!
This is supposedly normal for Google after 2-3 months for a new site but there does seem to be something else going on here. A lot of sites were sandboxed around the end of May/beginning of June as Google apparently made changes to their algorithm. there’s a long discussion about it at Digital Point Forum
Continue reading ‘Can you Live Without Google?’
Last month Google delisted all .info BANS sites (and other MFA* sites) Now it seems Google has it in for BANS sites with adsense.
Read this post by Mark Don’t Use Adsense on BANS sites
He’s had 23 .com BANS sites deindexed. All had adsense blocks. if you have adsense on BANS sites or MFA it might be a good idea to remove it.
I’ve never used adsense on my BANS sites as I believe it brings in very little commission and I don’t want to distract visitors from the auctions but I do have adsense on a blog in a subfolder of the site that was recently sandboxed by Google. Could this be the reason? I’m going to remove the adsense as it’s bringing in very little.
*MFA made for adsense - in other words thin affiliate sites
So we weren’t all imagining problems with the EBPN tracking! Check out this thread at the EBPN forum.
We have also found a discrepancy in the way ACRUs were attributed to affiliates on Commission Junction vs. now with eBay Partner Network. Although on eBay Partner Network we use the same underlying tracking system as on CJ (ValueClick’s MediaPlex), when we switched to eBay Partner Network a small issue was introduced where some ACRUs, specifically those where users were confirming their e-mails and then activating via a bid on different days, were not always getting credited to the right affiliate. 
and
Although we did thorough testing of our tracking system before launch (by eBay engineers as well as two outside companies that helped us build eBay Partner Network), like most other major advertising systems, now that we have some data on eBay Partner Network, we are bringing in a third party not involved in the original development to do a full, independent end-to-end test of our tracking system. This outside company has already begun to work with our teams. Their plan is to test some of the more basic things quickly and then finish the full test sometime in August. We plan to share the results of that test with you when complete, and will keep you updated as they complete different parts of their analysis.
no idea if they can make good on the errors that have past but at least they’re now working on the problem.
It’s now been a whole month since the change to eBay Partner Network (EBPN) from CJ so how are you commissions? There’s been a lot of activity on the forums with many people reporting commissions way down since the change. There have also been a number of problems that people have experienced this month in addition to the change to EBPN. Many of us have had our .info domains deindexed, people hosting on GoDaddy had no auctions showing on their sites for nearly 2 weeks and then Hostgator decided to change everyones passwords for security reasons so some websites had errors instead of auctions. Continue reading ‘Commissions Down on EBPN?’
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