The Dirty Frenchman

At one time or another you’ve probly heard of cookie stuffing. No, this isnt what fat girls do with delicious baked confections, it’s what [dirty] affiliates with fat pockets do. For the less technically inclined, lets break this down Barney Style.

When someone clicks an affiliate link, a cookie is set on their computer. When the surfer converts for the offer on the sponsor’s site the affiliate is tracked through the cookie that has been set and is paid out accordingly. That cookie will sit on their computer until it expires, is overwritten, or is cleared manually.  This is where the fun stuff comes into play. “Cookie Stuffing” is when a site “stuffs” a lot of cookies into a surfers computer without them clicking on anything. So even if the user doesn’t click on a link, but happens to go to that sponsor’s page and converts on an offer the affiliate gets paid even though they never sent the user to that site. It is commonly done with sites like Amazon and EBay, but also has many other implications. Affiliate networks typically are against this practice and may ban your account, but in my … er … from what I’ve been told: they really don’t give a rats ass.

One interesting application would be on a review type site. On the products review page many surfers are wise to what an affiliate link looks like, and will type the site’s URL in themselves. Those bastards! Why would you sit there and watch your hard earned commissions run away. One way would be to automatically set the cookie for that site on your review page so that you would receive credit if they directly typed in the site.

Am I going to give you an easy guide on how to do this or provide you with an easy to use script to stuff cookies for you? Sure, you can find the guide at http://www.google.com, with support from http://www.php.net (some assembly required)

Adios

So once in a while I like to release some free code for people to play around with, so here goes. It could be cleaned up a bit to be more efficient, but it gets the job done.  This is a class I wrote in php to scrape images from Google images. It returns an array with the URL to the thumbnail of the image, the URL to the full-size image, and the ALT text of the image as listed in Google Image search. If you can’t figure out what you can do with this, find a new job. This version will scrape the first page of listings - if you’d like you can modify it to scrape multiple pages… but I need to make this atleast a little fun, right?

-Frenchie

Note: A few people have remarked on using file_get_contents() instead of cURL, as well as a few PHP warnings for undefined constant links. My reasoning behind this: The current version that I have fixes all warnings, and uses cURL. I’m not giving that out for free. What you see here is an old version I had that was written at like 3am one night. I see it in the same light as people releasing security exploits to the public and purposely leaving in code errors: don’t give guns to children, give them super-soakers and leave it up to them to make an M-16 out of it.

Link for downloading:
The Dirty Frenchman’s Google Image Scraper

Putting together an effective SEO campaign is a great way to bring traffic to your site - how else would Bob in Milwaukee find out about your great page on Viagra? Here’s a list of five things that will cause your SEO campaign to suck at life.

1. Not realizing SEO is a marathon, not a sprint.

If I had a quarter for every time I had to explain to a client that they’re not going to rank for their first-tier terms after the first week of their campaign…well… I’d be playing a lot of skiball.  Listen, optimizing a site for organic search is not a one time thing. It’s a project that takes care, forethought, and a bit of work if you want to rank for anything other than “best little clown shoe store in Boston”.  Adjustments will have to be made, strategy may change. In short - don’t get discouraged and throw in the towel too early…. actually, do throw in the towel; it’s just more money for me.

2. Choosing the wrong keywords

This sounds too simple to be true, right? Well the majority of people on the interwebz are retards, including many ‘online marketers’. Please don’t be one of those people; I can only handle so many people on ICQ bugging me about how to improve their keyword lists at once. Your site is most likely new - this means that you don’t have too many pages or inbound links. Going for the most competitive keywords in your niche probly isn’t the smartest thing to do. Make sure that your targetted keyword list has plenty of long tail keywords that are less competitive and throw in some of the higher value ones in there. You’ve got to start somewhere.

3. Neglecting (proper) link building

Listen, building links sucks. It’s a menial and tiresome task but it has to be done. By putting your link building on the back burner you’re just setting yourself up for failure.  Any successful SEO campaign will have a good link building strategy that includes content that will attract those links.  And remember, linking to your site from your inter-linked network of 200+ PR1 spam blogs isn’t going to help as much as a few good targeted PR4-PR6 links from authoritative sites in your niche.

4. Your content is crap

Shouldn’t this be a no-brainer? Obviously not. If you can’t write above the level of a third grader then hire someone else to write your content. You can find decent writers on boards like WickedFire or even Digital Point for some pretty cheap rates (1-3 cents per word). So stop being a stingy bastard and get some quality content that will not only show search engines that you’re at least attempting to make something that’s not a piece of crap arbitrage site. Stop whining that you don’t think it’s good for usability - there’s plenty of places to include quality content without sacrificing usability.

5. Looking at rankings through beer goggles

This is somewhere that a lot of people just getting into SEO make mistakes.  So you pulled a few good rankings on Yahoo!.  Did you actually target those terms? Is your ranking for that term going to the best possible page on your site? Are you tracking how much traffic those terms are bringing in and how they’re actually converting. A ranking for any term doesn’t mean anything if it’s not contributing to your bottom line.

Howdy hoo, bitches. This is my little corner of the interwebz where I’ll be discussing a number of things ranging from coding to mainstream affiliate promotion to *gasp* adult affiliate promotion. If you don’t like what I’m talking about, no one is forcing you to read my drivel - so kick rocks.

Stay tuned, kiddies.