Steve’s Blog

Affiliate Link Cloaking with Joomla

This is a quick how-to requested by two SEO Club members.

The problem? Affiliate links are normally ugly and easy to spot: http://productsite.com/affiliates/affiliatelink?youraffiliatenumber=324. This means that:

  • Some websurfers are reluctant to click on affiliate links. They may be naturally suspect of someone linking to a product for money or they may just resent generating money for the writer they’re reading.
  • If the affiliate link is obvious, its easy to hijack. If you remind me they have an affiliate program, I could easily go to productsite.com, sign up as an affiliate and take the commission when I purchase there.
  • There is actually spyware out there that can automatically hijack links for some of the most popular affiliate programs.

The solution? Disguise affiliate links so that they look much more innocuous. Here are three ways to do that:

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Pagination Indignation

Joomla PaginationOK, indignation might be taking it a little too far, but pagination is annoying.

What’s Wrong With Pagination?

  • What’s the point? Does anyone say “I really want to go to page 68 of the blog?” No – they use the search.
  • Weak link text. From an SEO standpoint, does the link text “68” help Google understand what a page is about?
  • Impossible to optimize. Take page 68 as an example. You can optimize that page, but when you’ve published a few more posts all the content will move to page 69 and your work has been wasted. Most pages like this simply end up with a page title such as “Alledia Blog – Page 68”
  • Duplicate title tags: Check out this guy who has 1400 pages all with identical metadata, simply because of pagination.

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Advertise

Alledia.com is the most popular source for Joomla SEO information. We run one of the most popular blogs in the Joomla world and get visitors searching for thousands of diverse Joomla topics.

Advertising Banner on Alledia.com

We offer the option to place 125×125 advertising banners on the right-hand side of this site. The cost is $99 per month and you can sign up below:





Sponsored Reviews of Joomla Products on Alledia.com

We offer the option to have your Joomla product reviewed in a frontpage blog post. We can’t guarantee to like it, but we do guarantee to give an honest, detailed opinion. Reviews are $199:

Site Statistics

  • Traffic: Over 60,000 uniques per month
  • Growth: Traffic growing by over 80% per year
  • Example Top Keywords: “joomla seo”, “joomla drupal”, “joomla wordpress”, “joomla social networking”, “joomla rss”, “joomla video”, “sh404SEF”, “joomla admin templates”

Google Analytics Screenshot

alledia-ads.png

We reserve the right to refuse advertising for whatever reason. If we do, your payment will be returned in full.

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We Sponsor a New Version of Ninjamonials

Ninjamonials Joomla 1.5We’ve just sponsored Daniel and his team at Ninja Forge to create a new version of their Ninjamonials component for Joomla 1.5. Ninjamonials allows you to easily add customer testimonials to your Joomla site. Ryan over at JCE sponsored the other part of the conversion. You can see a live demo at JoomlaTraining.com.

Why a sponsorship? There’s been a double-whammy for Joomla developers recently with the recession and the need to move to a GPL license. Now is definitely a time to be trying new business models and looking for extra sources of income, so we were very happy to help test Daniel’s idea.

If I know one thing at the beginning of 2009, it’s that Joomla developers with only one source of revenue are in an even vulnerable position than normal. More thinking like Daniel’s is needed. My advice is to diversify, diversify, diversify:

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Joomla! Day Las Vegas in April

Joomla Day Las VegasLast spring the North American Joomla Day was in Vancouver. This time its down in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Joomla! Day Las Vegas is going to be an one-day conference of Joomla! experts
presenting on Joomla! basics,
design, development and advanced topics.

Presenters will include almost the entire Joomla core team including Andrew Eddie, Anthony Ferrara, Louis Landry and Rob Schley. Registration costs $45 and includes a personalized Joomla! Day Las Vegas t-shirt.

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A Proposal to Move Joomla Forward

This is a post that’s been lying around in various forms as a draft for over a year. I’ve dusted it off and decided to publish after the series of announcements made by the Joomla team over Christmas.

The announcements were about decisions concerning the Joomla Extensions Directory where I’m an editor. The decisions were to remove extensions that were for Joomla 1.0 only, weren’t licensed under the GPL or violated Joomla’s trademark.

Over the holidays, I’ve been talking closely with people who agree with the decisions and those who don’t. There are a good number of people on both sides. After listening carefully, I’d like to make several proposals in order to help us move forward effectively.

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3000 Comments and a Special Prize

Alledia CommentsIn June this year we reached 2000 comments on the Alledia blog. It took us about 18 months and over 400 blog posts to get there. We’re now nearly at 3000 comments, and it took only another 6 months.

As with the 2000 mark, whoever posts number 3000 will get a free lifetime SEO Club membership. We’re at 2975 right now, so 25 more to go ….

Thanks to everyone who has commented and guest-posted over the last 2 years. Enjoy the holidays!

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Open Question Joomla Holiday Coupons

Joomla XmasHo-ho-ho, and happy holidays to everyone. Here’s a round-up of this year’s holiday offers from lots of Joomla companies.

Have you found other coupons or do you have one for your own product? Feel free to post it in the comments:

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TimesSquare.com and Epson Both Run Joomla

TimesSquare.comGetting ready for New Years Eve? We’ve got the perfect Joomla site for you … TimesSquare.com.

The site ranks #1 in Google for “Times Square” and is a 1.0 site using JomComment, SEF Advance and Tagbot among others. The site has information on a lot more than just New Years Eve, but they do have a whole section of the simply dedicated to that night.

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Bolt Template Now Has No Conflict Guarantee

No Joomla Script Conflicts

Our goal for you is simplicity.

For this first time ever in the Joomla-world … we’re offering a 100% money-back guarantee if our template has script conflicts with any Joomla extension.

I hope this doesn’t make us broke, but hopefully its a useful and practical promise … You don’t want to waste your time figuring out what works with what. You just want to get up and running.

 

We guarantee Bolt will work first time with any extension … or just ask us for a refund.

We’re not aiming to compete with other template developers when it comes to features, options and plugins, but hopefully we can provide you with something that’s fast, optimized and easy-to-use.

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