issue #21, June 2005. Google Sitemaps, URL redirects with .htaccess and RSS feed syndication.

In this issue:

1) How Google helps you to get your site indexed better

2) .htaccess and the benefit of redirects

3) TheJungleMarketer´s blog

4) Stay Out of Legal Problems with RSS News Syndication


Enjoy !

1) How Google helps you get your site indexed better

Alex Fir, a fellow reader of my newsletter, asked me to investigate a new tool released by Google that helps your web pages getting indexed faster and crawled more frequently.

Yes - Google itself helps you to get your site indexed better.

How ? The answer is: Google Sitemaps !

Let´s see what Google itself says about this new tool:

"Google Sitemaps is an easy way for you to help improve your coverage in the Google index. It's a collaborative crawling system that enables you to communicate directly with Google to keep us informed of all your web pages, and when you make changes to these pages."

And more:

"With Google Sitemaps you get:

• Better crawl coverage to help people find more of your web pages
• Fresher search results
• A smarter crawl because you can provide specific information about all your web pages, such as when a page was last modified or how frequently a page changes"

Sounds interesting, especially the part which says that you can provide additional information about your pages.

But you should know that this tool is currently in beta and there´s no guarantee how fast and how complete Google will crawl your site after receiving your sitemap from you.

For now - don´t be tempted or lured into buying any expensive sitemap builder software that promises the world, because there are free scripts available and during the coming weeks I´ll check out Google Sitemaps in more details.

I´m particularly interested in how the sitemaps program helps to get a brand new site indexed, so I´ll need to build a new site with a few content pages, use Google´s sitemap generator to create and submit the sitemap and finally check the results.

I´ll let you know in the next newsletter ( or sooner ).

And if necessary - I´ll create a free tutorial for you to show you how to use Google Sitemaps.

Meanwhile, if you want to read more about Google Sitemaps, visit: https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/login

2) The benefits of redirects and how to use .htaccess to make them work.

When talking about redirects, many people (especially affiliate marketers) only think of masking their affiliate links, but that´s just a minor reason for using redirects.

Sure, it makes affiliate links look cleaner and might prevent some people to steal your affiliate commission when you promote ClickBank products. But what is more useful to me is that redirect URLs are much easier for ME to remember than affiliate URLs.

For example: everywhere I want to mention the WebLawGenerator, it´s easier for me to remember
http://www.thejunglemarketer.com/recommends/weblawgenerator
than
http://paydotcom.com/r/95/stiehle/110/2/

Another occasion where redirects are very useful are certain hyperlinks on your web pages. Imagine if you´d link to a service like Overture´s keyword tool on a couple of different pages using the direct URL and if this URL changed one day, you´d have to manually update all of these pages with the new URL. And probably you won´t even remember all the places you´ve posted a link.

So when you use your .htaccess file to make a redirect like http://www.thejunglemarketer.com/overturekeywordtool you´d only have to change the target URL and all your hyperlinks would automatically be updated.

Now the occasion where I´d say you MUST use redirects is when you place affiliate links into ebooks, reports, tutorials, articles, etc .. Those places where you do not have future access to modify the URLs.

Imagine the disaster if you´d write a report to promote an affiliate program, distribute thousands of copies and one day the merchant decides to switch to a different affiliate program provider and your affiliate link changes. Thousands of links would stop working.


So what is .htaccess anyway and how can you use it to make redirects work on your site ?

(technical side note: skip this part if you already know it)

What is .htaccess ?

.htaccess files are used to configure directories within the public environment of your web space. They are part of the configuration of your server, while your server also has a central configuration which is out of your reach / influence if you are hosting on a shared server.

.htaccess files work on Apache servers and can be used to password protect directories, to define custom error pages, to ban certain IP addresses or domains from accessing your site (or parts of it), to add certain PHP and other modules, etc ... and of course: to redirect your visitors.

The name of this file often confuses people, so let me say this once and forever very clear: the DOT before "htaccess" is NOT a typo ! It´s .htaccess ( DOT - HTACCESS without anything before the dot ).

.htaccess files are simple ASCII text files and must be edited with an ASCII text editor such as TextPad or Notepad ( NOT WordPad ).

It might be that you are not able to save a file under the name .htaccess on your computer. In this case you need to save it as 1.htaccess or htaccess.txt, then upload it to your server and rename it to ".htaccess".

Many webhosts also offer the possibility to manually edit .htaccess files online through their control panels.

If you encounter problems, ask your hosting company if they have any restrictions in their basic server configuration that disallow the use of certain .htaccess configuration options.

A good idea would be to refer to your webhost´s FAQs in order to get information about how to use .htaccess with your hosting company.

(end technical side note)

Defining redirects with a .htaccess file:

I suggest you use a special directory on your server only for redirects in order to avoid conflicts with existing or future directories, so your redirects would look something like

http://www.yourdomain.com/recommends/widget    or http://www.yourdomain.com/r/widget    or http://www.yourdomain.com/likes/thisgadget    

To make the above examples work, you´d need to add the following lines to your .htaccess file:

Redirect temp /recommends/widget TARGET-URL
Redirect temp /r/widget TARGET-URL
Redirect temp /likes/thisgadget TARGET-URL

replacing TARGET-URL with the full URL (http://...) to which you want to redirect your visitors.

That´s it.

3) TheJungleMarketer´s Blog

I´ve finally decided to start a blog again after my first rather negative experience in november 2004. Back then I thought I had to jump on the blogging bandwagon and add a blog to my site for the purpose of generating more traffic.

Here´s what happened:

I installed WordPress and posted my first article. Although I didn´t place a link to the blog, a few days later I received a comment so I knew my blog got noticed. This was due to WordPress automatically pinging the blog directories after the post was made.

My first reaction was exitement, but soon I got flooded with comments and I realized that these were just ordinary spam. Sure, I had the option to remove them but it would cost me too much time to moderate the comments, to sort out the legitimate ones from the spam.

I also didn´t like the design of the basic template and tried to adapt it to fit my site´s design, but I only managed to mess up the whole blog.

To save me from more frustration - I deleted the blog.

But this month, while setting up some content sites for AdSense and creating the CaRP video tutorial, it dawned upon me that blogs are way too powerful for content publishing, link building and traffic generating that I (and you) simply cannot longer stay without.

I looked at WordPress again, downloaded the newest version, installed it (which is a very easy process) and found out that the new version now has a lot more options to prevent comment spam and I also found a big arsenal of ready-made templates, which are very easy to use.

This encouraged me to add a WordPress blog to other sites, too but what really got me exited is the idea to use a blog not only as something like a personal diary but as a content publishing and web page generation tool.

Think about this:

1) How much time does it take to publish an article on a website in the ordinary way, i.e. transform the article into a html page, upload it to your server and also update other pages with a link to the new article so the search engine could find them ?

With a blog, it´s just a matter of copying the article into a box and press a button. And on top of that, your blog software will automatically notify lots of blog directories that you´ve posted a new article, so your new page also gets indexed a lot faster.

2) When you have a great idea in your mind that you would like to share with the world, would you write one or two short paragraphs and put them on a web page ? Probably not, as it takes too much time and the amount of content is too small to fill a web page.

With a blog, nobody expects you to always post whole articles. Nobody will blame you for posting short blocks of content. What´s important here is that the ease of publishing content on a blog turns you less reluctant to publishing, which means more content on more pages of your site which must result in more visitors and profits.

And there´s more exiting news:

You don´t have to create all the content by yourself. There are lots of places and resources that you can use to get content for your blog legally and free.

Let me emphasize this: LEGALLY !

Why ? Because in the past weeks, there´s been an increasing number of tools that especially make use of content from RSS newsfeeds without caring about any terms or copyrights.

I´ll talk more about that later in this letter.

I have yet to check out myself the following two services and will keep you updated with my experiences.

NewsIsFree.com

A service that provides you with news that you can use on your personal, non-commercial site (and of course also your blog)

I bet you now wonder if your site is commercial when you have AdSense or some affiliate links on it. Well - I´ve asked the people at NewsIsFree:

My Question:

At which point can a website be called commercial ? Is a personal blog commercial when I have Google AdSense on it ? Is a personal website commercial when I have occasional affiliate links on it ?

Their Answer:

No, these would be fine. Basically, we don´t want headlines used on a web site which contributes directly or indirectly to a business. you can´t sell access to the headlines, you can´t put headlines for free on a site which sells something, etc.

InfoGoRound.com

This service launched in may 2005. They give you access to an archive of articles in many different categories. The very important detail is that you have private label rights to all this content, which means that you can use these articles ...

• to build niche web sites
• in newsletters and ezines
• to post to your blogs
• to create books and ebooks
• to write special reports
• to produce training courses

It´s a membership site which costs 25 $ per month, but they have a cool reward program which makes your membership free. All you have to do is write just one quality article (minimum 400 words) per month.

I like this idea, it´s a strong incentive for every member to add content to the site.

And if you think you can´t write quality articles, maybe just because you have a german accent like me, simply hire somebody at Elance. You can get very good 400-800 words articles for 5-8 Dollars a piece. That´s still a lot cheaper than paying 25 $.

How I intend to use my blog:

Don´t think I just added a blog to my site to fill it with anything I can find in order to create content and increase traffic. There will be useful and original information, not only copied articles and definitely not anything like RSS2Blog generated junk.

There will be:

• short reviews / my 2 cents about tools and services.
• abstracts of hot discussions going on in seo and affiliate forums
• hot marketing ideas that come to my mind spontaneously and sometimes I forget before the end of the month. Now with the help of my blog I´m able to deliver them to you right away.
• web design tips, hosting technical stuff, tricks and guides
• search engine optimization news
• insights of what I´m doing in my daily marketing

My blog is located at http://www.thejunglemarketer.com/blog/

Feel free to syndicate it on your site or add it to your feed aggregator to read the latest news.

4) Stay Out of Legal Problems with RSS News Syndication

I believe it´s necessary to advice you to carefully use RSS newsfeeds on your website. Don´t get lured into thinking that there are no rules in the world of RSS. Many popular newsfeed providers offer their feeds ONLY to be viewed in feed aggregators or to be syndicated only on PERSONAL - NON COMMERCIAL websites.

The latest RSS tool I´ve seen recommended by many ezine editors is RSSContentBuilder.

When you look at the sales page you´d be surprised to see that they make you think that you can freely use RSS newsfeeds from Yahoo, CNN, NYTimes and Reuters. Well, my friend - you can´t.

If you are using any of the above feeds on a commercial site, you´re breaking their terms and infringing their copyrights.

Make sure you read the terms of use before you syndicate any content on your commercial sites. MYTimes for example has an interesting detail in their terms (yes - I´ve read them):

You cannot archive their news longer than 7 days, i.e. if you are using a tool like RSS2Blog in combination with NYTimes newsfeeds, you´re putting your business at risk.

I know, there are a couple of open questions such as the exact definitions of commercial and personal sites, so I´m planning to interview an internet lawyer as soon as possible and add this to the CaRP Cashing RSS Parser video tutorial.

Meanwhile you could learn how to automatically update your site with money making content using Amazon product feeds.

The video tutorial is now available with an exclusive bonus.

Download the CaRP Cashing RSS Parser video tutorial now.

Have a great weekend !

Yours,


Guido W. Stiehle
TheJungleMarketer

^^ TOP of Page ^^

Disclaimer

I accept no responsibility whatsoever for the content, profitability or legality of any published articles or advertisements contained within articles published on my web pages.

And, although all of the guest articles have been selected for their content, the publishing of such articles on this website does NOT constitute a recommendation of the products or services mentioned or advertised within those articles.
Be responsible! Always do Due Diligence before responding to any offer.

If you found some information to be out-of-date, please contact me and let me know it.
support #AT# thejunglemarketer.com

Sincerely Yours,

Guido W. Stiehle
TheJungleMarketer

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