The Goal
To attain a Page Rank of PR1 within 1 week.

The Reasoning
Although from a search engine perspective, Page Rank may be losing relevance, from a marketing perspective, Page Rank is still a useful and necessary indicator of website authority. For folks offering paid links or posts from their blog, the Page Rank value is not only important, but often necessary even to get the conversation started.

Keith’s goal was to begin using the KickJoey.com domain as a platform for paid reviews, so, attaining a Page Rank was deemed a necessity.

The Result
Unfortunately, after one week, even with some promotion across the blogosphere, his domain remained at PR0. But that never really surprised anyone, considering how infrequently Page Rank gets updated. To be honest, I didn’t think Keith had a chance. I figured he’d have to wait til the next big Google index PR update occurred, if Google ever does one of those again.

Happily, there is a positive ending to this story. After 4 more weeks of waiting, Keith did notice his domain was finally awarded a Page Rank of PR2.

While you might say to yourself, “But it’s just a PR2. Why the fuss?” Why the fuss? Because I can honestly tell you I know many other bloggers who are still waiting for their PR to update after many months of waiting. Is it just bad luck on their part? Probably not.

When asked about the PR2 Page Rank, Keith mentioned to me that he probably owes it to the 4 PR4 backlinks he received while promoting the experiment (and less so to the PR2 backlink that he got from this site, LOL).

Well, there ya have it. A happy ending to the 1-Week PR Experiment.

And if there’s a lesson to be learned here, it’s that if you’re a new blogger anxious to be awarded a Page Rank, you better make some friends in high places… I mean, with high Page Rank…

If you haven’t heard yet, you can use coupon code 99DOMAIN over at GoDaddy.com to purchase .com/.net/.org domain names for 99 cents!

This is a smoking deal for anyone looking to start the New Year fresh with a new blog/website. Even if all you do is buy a domain for $0.99 and flip it for a few dollars on SitePoint or DigitalPoint, that few dollars is nearly pure profit!

To make the deal even more smoking, as always, if you purchase 5 or more domains from GoDaddy, they’ll throw in free Privacy Registration (a $11 savings on each domain!).

Keep in mind, this is just for 1-year domain name registrations. I’ve got a handful I’ll be registering tonight. Lemme know which domains you end up picking up!

Introduction to Affiliate Link Cloaking

To improve the effectiveness of affiliate links, Internet marketers often “cloak” their links. For example, on my blog, I’ve cloaked my affiliate link to Market Leverage.

Cloaking changes the URL from

http://trendsbiz.com/a.php?a=CD11894&b=25367&d=470782&l=0&o=&p=0&c=4110&s1=&s2=&s3=&s4=&s5=

to

http://www.roryhansen.ca/recommends/marketleverage.php

Benefits of Cloaking your Affiliate Links

This has a number of benefits, including but not limited to:

• Prevention of affiliate link hijacking
• Increased professionalism through attractive affiliate link presentation
• Increased click-thru rate
• Improved search engine optimization, because Google doesn’t like affiliate links

How to Cloak your Affiliate Links

There are a number of high-quality products out there to help manage affiliate links, probably the most notable being the Ninja Affiliate Plug-in for WordPress.  These products can cost nearly $100 to purchase, and while that might be pennies in the jar for many Internet marketers, for those just starting out on the making money online scene, $100 can be a rather large investment. For that reason, this blog post isn’t about those expensive products.

The purpose of this blog post is to show you how you can cloak your affiliate URLs yourself, for free, and in just a few seconds.

To do this, we’ll be using PHP, and in a nut shell, creating a PHP file on your web site that will redirect the user to your affiliate link.

Note: This is a very simplistic example, that does not contain any click logging and should probably not be used to manage more than 10 – 15 affiliate links. If you require a heavy-duty solution, you should consider the Ninja Affiliate Plug-in, or some similar product.

Note 2: To make an even more attractive affiliate link structure, it’s possible to use more advanced techniques, like creating a .htaccess file and specifying your URL format. But, that topic is out of scope for this post, too.

Anyway, let’s get started.

Step 1: Determine how you want your links to look

If you scroll up, you’ll notice that in the example, I decided that I wanted my affiliate links to take the form:

http://www.roryhansen.ca/recommends/productname.php

I’ve used the word “recommends” in the link to further “sell” the link. Many other famous IM’s use this same naming convention. Others have used similar naming conventions, such as:

http://www.roryhansen.ca/go/productname.php

http://www.roryhansen.ca/goto/productname.php

It’s really a personal choice, but you’ll need to decide that now before you proceed.

Step 2: Create a new subdirectory on your website

Using your favourite FTP program, connect to your website’s FTP server. In your base web site directory, you’ll need to create a new directory to store all of your cloaked affiliate link files.

In my example, the new directory I created was called “recommends”. This is what enables the cloaked affiliate link format I decided upon.

Step 3: Create your cloaked affiliate link file

In a text editor like Notepad, cut-and-paste the following code:

<?php
header(’Location: YOUR_AFFILIATE_LINK_URL_HERE’);
?>

Replace YOUR_AFFILIATE_LINK_URL_HERE with the actual affiliate link for your product.

Save the file using a friendly filename, to represent the product you’re advertising. In reference to my earlier example, I saved my file as marketleverage.php.

Step 4: Upload your cloaked affiliate link file

Again using your FTP program, upload your new cloaked affiliate link file into the new folder you just created.

And you’re done!

So, how does this work?

In your blog posts, you’re now going to link to the new cloaked affiliate link file you just created. For example, you might write:

Click here to sign-up for <a href=”http://www.roryhansen.ca/recommends/marketleverage.php”>Market Leverage</a>.

The code in the file tells the browser to redirect the user to the URL you included into the file.

User clicks on link –> Browser goes to marketleverage.php –> Code tells browser to redirect user to the real affiliate link.

And there you have it, your first cloaked affiliate link.

Happy affiliate marketing!

Shaun at Hobo has created a list of tips on what to AVOID doing, by summarizing many of the suggestions from the Starter Guide. Here are some interesting ones I saw:

Avoid:

• having deep nesting of subdirectories like “…/dir1/dir2/dir3/dir4/dir5/dir6/
  page.html”
• creating an HTML sitemap that simply lists pages without organizing them
• allowing your 404 pages to be indexed in search engines (make sure that your
  webserver is configured to give a 404 HTTP status code when non-existent
  pages are requested)
• having a navigation based entirely on drop-down menus, images, or animations

There are a total of 30 tips listed on Shaun’s post. Read them all here.

Thankfully, SERP’s seem to be returning to where they were pre-Halloween, as in the last 24 hours I’ve started to regain my keyword positions. (At least for some keywords.) I expect the Google Dance to go on for another 24 hours or so, after which time things should be back to normal.

I’ll be doing a more complete write-up of this after work today, but from the reading I’ve been doing, it seems to have been a Google error, where they accidentally reverted to old indexing data.