REFERRALS partners wanted

[Andy Warner]

Hi folks,

We are all in the same boat here, selling with Actinic on the net.

I sell a selection of games from 'murder mystery' to 'board games' to (ducks for cover) 'roleplaying games' but I dont do 'everything' as I just dont have the time, capital and expertise.

SO... I am looking for partners to advertise their site on my shop, and vice versa,

I use the referral system bundled with actinic (which works well) and have banners readily available on the site.

If you are interested, let me know or visit the site

www.legendgames.co.uk and view the 'referrals' link.

Your site doesnt have to be games oriented. As long as it would appeal to the kind of nerd, I mean shopper, visiting my site, I would be interested in hearing from you.

Examples would be clothing shops, record shops, computer game shops, card game shops, wierd stuff shops (tarot, new age etc).

My shoppers are often in their 20-30s and usually quite an intelligent lot, judging by comments we get. we get male and female shoppers, but mostly male.

Get in touch, it could help all of us.

andy warner

www.legendgames.co.uk

[admad1]

Hello Andy. Good idea but after visiting your site I find you have a very heavy home page there. My analysis shows that on average it takes 133 seconds on a 28kbp modem 72 on a 56kbp modem.

I would suggest you optimize the page for faster loading I'm on ADSL and it took a while to load even for me. One of the main culprits is your image at the top of the page ( LGInterOldCAmin.gif) which is a whooping 128kb a definite lag on load times.

The images at the bottom which show you as registered with ukshoponline etc are outward links from your home page, I’m not an expert but the fewer outbound links ( especially on your home page) and the more inbound the better you are optimized for google ( well that was the case before google did a reshuffle not sure now) you have 6 outbound links from your home page I would dump them and concentrate on having a faster loading homepage.

Good Luck

Andy

[Josie]

Hello both,

Slightly worried about this as our site has a group of shopping site links at the bottom and I'm wondering if this would cause the same problems. Admad, are you talking about the links themselves slowing google down or the images?

We noticed that when we used linked images (ie. <image src="http://someothersite.co.uk/image.gif">) this did cause a delay in upload speed as the browser was off searching for these images, whereas if we downloaded those images from the site and put them on our own server (ie. <image src="image.gif">) it was fine. Doing this means you gain control over the image, even though the shop sites themselves don't want you to do it.

Do we have anything to worry about with google optimization for having these shop site links? I thought that the more links you had to other websites, the better ranking you'd get with google. That's why we embarked on slapping all these horrendous garish flashing adverts on in the first place.

Josie
www.csbooks.co.uk

[admad1]

Hello Josie
I think you have misunderstood when I talk about outward bound links. The links have nothing to do with slowing google down. Outward bound links to other sites from your own site (image or text links) can reduce your page rank especially from the home page as the googlebot spider follows these links and can reduce what is known as page rank.

"Do we have anything to worry about with google optimization for having these shop site links? I thought that the more links you had to other websites, the better ranking you'd get with google. That's why we embarked on slapping all these horrendous garish flashing adverts on in the first place. "

The more links you have the better, if there from other sites linking to yours and not vice a versa every link from your site linking to other sites are outward bound links and give more prominence to the site you are linking to.

I am no expert on all this but my experience is that many sites claim to link back but have there links running through what’s called a counter script which effectively stops leakage from the own site via links to for instance your own

All of this could now be redundant information as google have changed there algorithm and it’s difficult to know what’s going on.

I have had a look at your site and I see you are using the actinic homepage. I would create a separate homepage and get rid of all those awful adverts. No offence but having a counter on a website is meaningless as they can be set to any figure you want and generally gives the impression of a home user page not something you want for a company image.

Your page loads in 46 seconds you could improve this by dumping those images the only ones I would keep are the credit card and HSBC logos.
I certainly wouldn’t be giving free advertising to 1&1 or Actinic after all you pay for there products let them pay for space on your site.

By the way how do you find 1&1 I was considering trying them out?

Regards
ANDY

[pinbrook]

Very good Advice given by Andy here.

The simple idea of links is to get incoming links and not give away outgoing links. If you do offer to exchange links do not exchange with anyone whose page rank is less than your own.

[Jan]

Does it matter if the links are not on your home page, I was thinking of adding a customers page to my site, the idea being that it would list some of my customers with examples of what they are doing. I would include a link to their websites on this page.

Cheers,

[george]

Very good idea Jan!

[Jan]

:-) Thanks George.

Another thing I am thinking of doing is starting an affiliate scheme, this would involve putting my logo onto your site - a bit like the powered by Actinic thingy - then if your customers click on the logo, come to Mole End and buy software you get a share of the sale value. This means that customers that I list might well also link back to me which creates a link cycle (I think) and I can't remember whether that is good or bad.

We do very well ATM in searching and I don't want to endanger that but I do feel as if I need to try to improve my google ranking.

Does google take number of visitors into account?

Regards,

[pinbrook]

Does it matter if the links are not on your home page

Each and every page has its own page rank, thus you need incoming links to each page to improve its rank.

Internal links can help

[Jan]

Thanks Jo. I didn't realise that either.

I was referring to outgoing links though, from reading the discussion above and from comments that have been made to me I think that outgoing links can be a bad idea and that link cycles can be really bad. Is that right?

Regards,

[pinbrook]

Keep outgoing links to a minimum ie keep the ones that occur naturally within the site - customer recommendations for example.

Only offer link exchanges (linkcycle) with a page that has a higher page rank than your own (thus you gain some of their rank and give away less.)

An affiliate scheme will pay dividends since all those links will be inbound. as long as you don't give a link back

[Jan]

An affiliate scheme will pay dividends since all those links will be inbound. as long as you don't give a link back

Does this mean a link back to them on that page or a link back to them anywhere on the site?

Regards,

[pinbrook]

if its an affiliate scheme there is no need to give a link back.

But generally any link from a page causes "leakage" which has to be compensated for somehow

[Josie]

Hi all, I'm finding this discussion really interesting.

Thanks for comments Andy (admad), we have taken on board what you said about the shop links and are now putting them on our 'links' page rather than the front page - I presume this would reduce the risk of google ranking going down?

Our google rank is 5 for the front page - which is empty with a direct automatic referral to the actinic index - and 4 for the actinic index page. We are working on a new front page that holds more information. As a ranking, 4 to 5 is ok isn't it?

The actinic and 1and1 referrer links are both affiliate schemes so they don't pay us for the ad but would pay if the link was followed and the person subscribed, we get points from actinic and money from 1and1. 1and1 are a good host and reasonably priced without many problems so far. The tech support is not the best but they are the cheapest hosts we've found so we'd recommend them for someone who can work out their own tech problems. If you decide to subscribe to 1and1 then you are welcome to use the link from our site

Another question regarding google optimisation, but slightly off-topic. We are using a hidden phrase (!!<<noscript>>!! tags) to include the standard book number (isbn) within the product details. We had the idea to use the noscript tags from a piece on Norman's site. Our idea was that a person could search by the isbn but that would not be shown to customers as then they could take that and go on to a price comparison or rival site. Our question is, will using hidden text get us penalised by google?

[george]

My site probably a good one to discuss.

Homepage is a 5. Other brochure pages including about us, contact us and links page (with a number of links to other sites, in text format), are all a 4.

My home page is being re-designed offline at the moment but obviously would like to increase the `quality` of it. What figure should we ideally (and realistically) be looking to be awarded?