Affiliate Musketeer

I’m going to start this post by telling you just how pissed off and frustrated I am with my bar stools website. I’m also going to throw in some extra text links to the site in this same sentence because I’m so fu**ed off with things – the site also compares kitchen bar stools, breakfast bar stools and retro bar stools too. I’m pissed off because it’s dropped its SERPs again and it’s just got messed up cos I upgraded to WordPress 3.0. Wait, there’s more…

I actually don’t have a fucking clue how to make WP google friendly. I thought I did, but as it happens, this crazy bouncing around the SERPs has just made me realise that clearly, I don’t. So what have I done about it. I’ve spent the last hour reading up other blogs about worpdress seo. I’ve spent the few hours prior to that making some adjustments to my site:

1. Removed duplicate content from my homepage.
   I was displaying the description/content for each bar stool on the home page and every other page that the stool is placed on in a div that was ‘hiding’ the text to the user. I always knew this was bad SEO crack but it seemed like a good way to get content onto the homepage without cluttering up the page. I’m done with risks now though, I just want this site to rank. I have now adjusted this so that the content only gets displayed on actual product pages and Ive removed all ‘hidden’ elements.
2. Added Unique Category Descriptions
   I always had unique category descriptions. The problem was they were also being used as ‘title’ tags for the category links which meant that when a user hovered over a category, the category description would appear in a pop-up text alt box. As the categories are listed on every page, this would mean that my ‘unique’ category descriptions were actually present on every page of the site – surely bad for SEO and been kicked in the teeth so much with this site now that I’m doing something about it.
3. Upgraded to WP 3.0
   What a load of bollocks this turned out to be. I did this and it fucked up my whole category custom permalink settings. I have now had to adjust the custom permalink category base to be ‘shop’ so now my urls read:
   www.mysite.co.uk/shop/chrome-products as opposed to www.mysite.co.uk/chrome-products

   Maybe it’ll have a positive impact seen as though my old structure was seemingly shit for SEO anyway. With this new structure in place that works with 3.0 and my new motivation to create unique content on category pages, the fact that these urls never existed in the past before and now contain ‘unique’ content may be a good thing. I guess I’ll have to find some way to tell google my old category urls no longer work :p what a load of shit.

So those are the few things I’ve done tonight (or tried to) to get this piece of shit site up and running properly.

If you can’t detect my sincere can’t be arsed for this shite attitude throughout this post then you probably shouldn’t be doing this affiliate marketing bullshit.

There might just be a few cynical, disheartened and completely pissed off would be (and that really is key here – WOULD BE) affiliates reading this and if so, I’d love to hear just how shit you think Affiliate Marketing really is and what a waste of time and bollock ache it’s turned out to be for you too.

If there’s people out there who have no idea what I’m talking about, you’re either full of shit and a liar or you really are a complete noob to this soul destroying occupation.

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