"Got Cookies? Your Competitors Are Literally GIVING Them Away To Every Visitor... You Can Too"
Here's the straight poop:
Google Hates You
The quicker you wake up and come to grips with this the faster you can start making money.
Google does not like pages selling ebooks.
Google does not like arbitrage landing pages.
Google does not like affiliate sites.
Google does not like pricing aggregators.
Get the picture?
What? You don't believe me? Try this:
source: https://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=66238
Now, if you think the quality score guidelines are only about PPC, you're wrong. Google is always trying to determine commercial intent. All the search engines are. And in Google's mind, an affiliate website, a ebook sales page, and a lot of other things that we take for granted as internet marketers get a little black mark from big G.
Ok, so the first thing you have to do when you make any form of affiliate website or page is this...
Cloak Your Links
There is nothing super ninja about this. There isn't anything evil, illegal, immoral, or bad. When people see the word "cloak" they freak.
Calm the fuck down. All I am saying is that instead of a link that looks like this:
http://123456.hop.clickbank.net
or this:
http://ThongSecrets.com/index.php?aff=1234QX&tid=g101298
you use links like this:
http://mysite.com/thongsecrets
or this:
http://mysite.com/go/getlucky
Now, doing this has TONS of advantages. Google sees your links as on-site links and you avoid the dreaded "thin affiliate" footprint (or at least delay it until some $0.03/hour kid in a low labor market comes and looks at your page... but that's another story).
The other advantage is that almost all the scripts out there that let you cloak your affiliate links also have tracking and split testing built in.
I use John Reel's GoTryThis Blackhat Edition since it not only cloaks my links, AND tracks, AND split tests... it also stuffs cookies. But first the bad news - GTT is not available at this time.
John Hostler also has his Renegade Cloaker tool. Really cook and really cheap - $7. Does 99.8% of what GTT does for a fraction of the cost. If you don't already have a link cloaker (and link cookie stuffer) then I recommend you GET JOHN'S RENEGADE CLOAKER TODAY.
But I didn't write this page to try and pimp some $7 link tracking script -- no matter HOW GOOD IT IS.
Nope, I wrote this to tell you that Google doesn't like most of what you are probably doing online unless you're Andy Jenkins and Brad Fallon and killing it with your ecommerce stores.
Wordpress Users Are Out
In The Cold? Not Exactly...
If you're a Wordpress junkie trying to make your fortune blogging and providing excellent content, then all the more power to you. It's a tough road to hoe but I respect what you're doing.
Hell, every internet marketer I come across these days is using Wordpress as their main site building tool. Gone are the days of Frontpage, Dreamweaver, XSite Pro, and the like.
Me? I love Wordpress for automatic content generation, blogs, CMS's, and just getting Google spiders to crawl all over my shit. But for lots of things I still use a plain 'ole text editor.
Actually, who am I kidding? Most of my stuff these days is written in Manilla by someone that speaks the King's English better than I ever will.
But I digress...
If you're using Wordpress you can still use Renegade Cloaker or GTT. But there is a simpler option if all you're looking to do is cloak your affiliate links.
This has to be one of the coolest and bad ass plugins to Wordpress. You can get all geeked out with the thing but the basics are simple - the Redirection plugin lets you cloak your affiliate links and track the clicks. Simple.
Redirection doesn't stuff cookies with the link but then again, what do you expect for free? It's not like you forked over a whopping $7 for Hostler's script.
There is a downside to all the link cloaker scripts. They only stuff cookies when someone clicks on the link. There is no way to automatically stuff cookies when someone reads a post or loads a webpage.
What you really want is the best of both world's. You want to cloak your links and stuff the cookie anytime someone comes to the page.
Bet you know what's coming next :-)