HOW TO PROMOTE WEBSITES AND SOCIAL NETWORKING SITES THAT ARE NOT SEARCH ENGINE FRIENDLY (SOCIAL NETWORKS NOT SEO FRIENDLY)
#1 - YOU DO NOT ALWAYS NEED TO CLOAK
I have recently joined a few "social networking communities that pay you". Surprisingly, some of these social networks are search engine friendly, though a few are not designed as SEO friendly sites. It is unfortunately for them as it will take more money and sweat equity for these social networks to gain popularity and build a network of referring members. Well, that is if they want to be as successful as their non-paying, paying and business networking competitors.
You are probably wondering why I bothered to join these networks if I prefer search engine friendly websites. Well, I became a member of those networks because they are either user friendly, cater to a specific niche, have members that I would like to connect with and /or an earning potential / compensation plan that is desirable to me. I know that they are not search engine friendly social networks and that can mean less organic exposure for my profile pages, blogs, groups and referral pages. On the other hand, the previously mentioned benefits, as well as my understanding of website design and SEO marketing, make them well worth the extra effort needed to effectively promote social networking websites that are not seo friendly.
As the old saying goes, this is "Six of one, half a dozen of another" to me. If you do not understand, please send me an email and I will explain what this means to me.
ON THE OTHER HAND, THESE NETWORKS DO PROVIDE SEARCH ENGINE FRIENDLY LINKS TO MY PROFILE PAGES. MOST ALSO HAVE REFERRAL / SIGN UP LINKS THAT ARE EITHER SEARCH ENGINE FRIENDLY OR HAVE VERY FEW PARAMETERS IN THEIR DYNAMIC URLS (website links)
Now, even though these business and social networks are not designed with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) in mind, they do provide seo friendly referral links and this is where you have the advantage over any affiliate program or networking site that does not.
This is an example of a SEO friendly sign up link:
http://www.squidoo.com/lensmaster/referral/leacharlton
Here are examples of a referral links that are not SEO friendly:
http://www.6dgr.com/index.php?mode=join&ref_id=4192
http://qyao.com/signup.php?REF=68672
NOTE TO EXPLAIN PARAMETER(S):
The second link example is much better than the first because it only has one parameter (parameter = anything after the ? and between the &). Many popular search engines will often read these links whether you manually drive traffic to your personal pages or not. The first link example will need for your to refer much more traffic to that page in order for the potential of a search engine to read them. That is if the search engines include them at all.
NOTE TO EXPLAIN DYNAMIC PAGE URLS
Dynamic websites have databases attached to them. We call these url pages, though they are really not "static" pages. The parameters that I mentioned above are how the code pulls the information from the database, therefore if you go to a dynamic website (say a book store) and search for information (a book about blogging), that information (the book) is listed in the database and is added to the "static" url (www.xxxxxx.com).
These are examples of a search engine friendly profile links:
http://www.6dgr.com/pittsburghinternetmarketing
http://members.toksee.com/almcsolutions
Here are profile links that are not SEO friendly:
http://www.6dgr.com/index.php?mode=people_card&p_id=4192
http://newweb20.com/forum/index.php?action=profile
http://www.reality-networkers.com/marketingsecret3.php?refid=1959493
When a social network, affiliate landing page or dynamic website is designed this way, it is more to your benefit to use the search engine friendly link for promoting your profile. Do not cloak the dynamic links with tiny url or another program - this has already been done for you by the social network when they made the seo friendly link.
TIP #1
Do not cloak your dynamic profile link page (See this example dynamic profile page url: http://www.6dgr.com/index.php?mode=people_card&p_id=4192) because
the social network has already created one for you on their network. You can typically find this in the area directly under your picture and it will say "website link" or "personal url".
If you are using a search engine friendly social networking site, then the website link / personal url that is provided for you is the one that shows in the browser above the page (where you type in the www.xxxxxxxxx.com) will match you personal profile link the social network created for you.
This is great - use it!
If you are not using a search engine friendly social network, then the personal url / website link will not match.
In this case you will want to use them both for promoting your profile page. Here are a few suggestions on how to do this:
1) When you want to post your url like this: http://www.yuwie.com/leacharlton/ then you want to use this search engine friendly website link the social network or affiliate program provides for you.
2) When you want to make a link like this: Get paid $4 for each referral then you link your dynamic url - http://www.6dgr.com/index.php?mode=people_card&p_id=4192
3) You can even use the search engine friendly url as the text for the link of the dynamic url.
For example: http://www.6dgr.com/pittsburghinternetmarketing
The only times you want to use cloaking software like tiny url is when you are entering a dynamic url is when you need to use a registration form to place a link on a classified or advertising site. This is only if the social networking site did not provide one for you.
TIP #2
At first, try to use the dynamic page url as much as possible to see if you can get it read ....
9/8/08 - Here is what YAHOO has to say about dynamic pages
Yahoo! Slurp has support for frames and makes an effort to crawl
complex URLs such as those generated by forms, content generation
systems, and dynamic page generation software.
We strive to crawl sites without requiring any special support from
web masters, however, there are many ways to unintentionally build
sites that can not be crawled by Yahoo! Slurp or any other web search
engine robot. Be sure to apply robot exclusion rules for pages or
directories that are not to be crawled, such as product order pages or
bulletin boards.
http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/search/webcrawler/slurp-09.html
9/8/08 - Here is what GOOGLE has to say about dynamic urls:
If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a "?"
character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic
pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short
and the number of them few.
(This information was found in the third section - second to last bullet)
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769
9/8/08 - This is what MSN has to say about dynamic pages - which I believe that if their crawler notices that the dynamic url is not changing, they will read and rank it. We will just have to test it a while to see.
AT MSN TYPE THIS IN THE SEARCH TOOL BAR: Crawl issues
http://help.live.com/help.aspx?mkt=en-us&project=wl_webmasters
If know that this blog goes against all that you were taught about cloaking and such, but what can I say ... times have changed or I noticed that you were confused as to when to use cloaked links or not. Research this information for yourself. I have provided examples and search engine criteria to prove that you do not need to cloak those short, dynamic, social network links because they have already done that for you. Submit the provided links to the search engines or link them to ranked sites, so that they are read naturally. You can also use search feeds and blogs. The objective is to use them and gain search engine traffic for your business.
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