It’s been a little over 2 months since my last progress report on the Cheap Electricity Options blog. The blog is now just over 4 months old. This is what it looks like now:

I’ve added a couple of more plugins to the site to help in getting more backlinks:

Indexing Tool Plugin: This is a commercial plugin ($47) that aids in getting backlinks by getting the articles you submit to article directories and blogs indexed. Rather than repeating information here, you can read my review of the Indexing Tool plugin here.

Pingback Optimizer Plugin: This is an alternative plugin to the Index Tool above but, since both plugins use different methods for getting the search engines to spider pages on external sites, I use both together. There’s more info on Pingback Optimizer here.

Web Traffic Genius Plugin: I was already using this plugin on the site but the developers released a new version a few weeks back that adds even more RSS aggregators so the RSS feeds it creates for each new post added to a blog can be sent out to those extra aggregators. This results in even more backlinks and visitors.
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If you do article marketing, your articles will be added to numerous blogs, especially if you use a service like Unique Article Wizard (UAW) or Article Marketing Automation (AMA). But, generally, once the articles are submitted, we all assume it’s job done and move on to something else.

Each article submitted will have a couple of links in it to your site and if there are several hundred versions of an article submitted to services like UAW or AMA, then that’s several hundred backlinks we’ll get as a result. Right? That’s what I thought but it’s not the case.

You only get the backlinks if the page on which your article is published is indexed by the search engines (i.e. the search engines know it exists). And not all your submissions will get indexed. This even happens with the likes of EzineArticles and GoArticles. They may be high PR sites and there’s an assumption that submitting articles there will get you guaranteed backlinks with high PR juice. Yes, that may happen but it’s not guaranteed.

So, in order to get the backlinks and the benefit provided by them, as many of your article submissions as possible need to be indexed. And that’s where the Indexing Tool comes in.
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Following on from Amazon pulling the plug entirely on associates in Colorado in March this year due to a Sales tax measure introduced in that state, yesterday they fired out an email to associates about an upcoming change to their API which will affect a huge number of associates who use various plugins to add products and customer reviews to their sites. Here’s what they said in their email:

On November 8, 2010 the Reviews response group of the Product Advertising API will no longer return customer reviews content and instead will return a link to customer reviews content hosted on Amazon.com. You will be able to display customer reviews on your site using that link. Please refer to the Product Advertising API Developer guide found here for more details. The Reviews response group will continue to function as before until November 8 and the new link to customer reviews is available to you now through the Product Advertising API as well.

What this means is that Amazon will, as of Nov. 8th 2010, no longer be providing customer reviews through their API. So you won’t be able to add customer reviews to your posts and articles as you have done in the past. Amazon, instead, will provide a link to an iframe that you can include on your site. Since search engines can’t parse the contents of an iframe, there’s no SEO benefit from including them on a page. Visitors will, however, still be able to read the customer reviews in the iframe on your site and your associates ID is encoded into the iframe so you will still earn commissions on sales.

So why are Amazon making this change?
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In the last post, I looked at options for getting traffic to your sites that don’t cost any money, but cost some time and effort.  This time, I’ll look at some methods that do cost money but don’t cost much time or effort.

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