Links & Linking

I woke up motivated this morning! Usually I like to 'take it easy' on Saturday's - maybe work on my own site, research something interesting or catch up on a few emails. But today I'm in the mood to tackle some of the things on my task list, and make some serious progress!

At the same time, my mind is going in a million different directions - no focus whatsoever. So I started out checking stats, checking email, looking over the forums, updating my Product Feed, etc. I just grabbed a notepad, and started jotting down things as they came to mind while I was going through those things.

Then I came here to write a bit, as that always helps me to get focused. Something about blogging really helps me to clear the slate and get moving in a good direction for the day. At the moment, while I'm writing, I have files uploading in the background - a site wide update that was one of the things I jotted down on my notepad.

Basically I was just cloaking my affiliate links on the affiliate site. So that when visitors hold their mouse over a link or a product picture, it says "click here for details" in the status bar instead of a long ugly affiliate link.

This is pretty easy in dreamweaver. You just go to Edit > Find and Replace, and then use the drop down box at the top to switch from "current document" to the entire folder (so that you can update all of the web pages within a specific folder, or directory).

In the "Search For" box, put:

a href

In the "Replace With" box, put:

a onMouseOver="window.status='click for details'; return true" onMouseOut="window.status=''" href


This would actually put "click for details" in the status bar for ALL of the links on your pages, which you may not want to do. If you only want to cloak affiliate links, and all of those links start the same (CJ links for example) - you could do it like this:

In the "Search For" box, put:

a href="http://www.qksrv

In the "Replace With" box, put:

a onMouseOver="window.status='click for details'; return true" onMouseOut="window.status=''" href="http://www.qksrv


This will cloak all of those affiliate links on your site, and then you simply upload them. Doing something like this manually would be a huge task - and take forever. If you have very many products listed on your pages, that is. This particular site is over 200 pages, some pages listing over 100 products.


Speaking of 'saving time' - Albert was asking me if there wasn't an easier way to get Inbound Links. He has been working on the Link Strategy for the affiliate site for several days now - submitting and exchanging links with hundreds of sites.

He looked up this morning and said, "We're going to be doing this for months!"

LOL

Now that's one I dont have an easy solution for. There are options for automating or speeding up this process, but most SEO's will warn you that it's not good practice - and can get you banned or penalized by the major search engines.

Here are a few topics where that was discussed, specifically:

Zeus Robot?

Some Food For Thought Before Participating In "Legitimate" Link Exchange Programs

Back to the grindstone, right? Yup.


There is one site that is relatively new, and looks "clean". Check this one out:

Willing link partners in your
niche, delivered to your inbox.
http://Links-For-You.com

This could be a big help in staying on top of new linking opportunities ;)


I better get back to work... I still have 6 tasks on my notepad, and would like to get done in plenty of time to catch a good movie and take it easy this evening ;)

Have a good weekend!