In the financial world, the FTSE has key figures that the market use as pointers to whether the market will rise or fall over the next few weeks. If the FTSE hits the magical figure, then confidence rises etc.

So, I’ve decided to announce that Cashback Shopper has reached the milestone (albeit modest) membership total of 5000! Naturally, the membership of cashback sites is fairly fluid, with people switching from one to another to get sign up bonuses etc. but I’m pleased to have reached this total & plan to celebrate by running a competition on the site!

I will be offering a (also modest) cash prize draw – every pound earned in cash-back by members will qualify them for an entry into the draw. Luckily, eDealsUK have all the tools to be able to offer and administer this, built into their white label system & so I just have to offer & publicise the competition.

As soon as the competition details are finalised, I’ll advertise it both here and on the site, as well as by newsletter to the members )

Matt Cutts recently announced on his blog that Google would be updating the Page Rank toolbar with its latest ranking changes (although these changes have been active for about 3 months before getting to us).

Despite varying opinions on the importance or validity of Page Rank, it’s nice to see that Cashback Shopper & FreshWebz have both risen to PR3!

Also, after dropping a few places (over 98,000) on the Alexa ranking, to 498,959 at the end of June, Cashback Shopper has pulled back up to 468,108 as of today. This is still the highest placed white label site in the Cashback News chart!

In an attempt to widen the net for my affiliate sites, I’ve recently set up a number of full page ads using the Pagerank10 advertising service, which they emphasise is NOT a paid links directory. They state that because of this you can get real targeted visitors to your website via the ‘full page ad’ you create. “Create Full Page Ads & Free Text Ads to advertise your website, products or services and receive real targeted visitors”.

The pages even have referral reports in the account control panel so that you can see how your site is being picked up & found in the search engines & which search phrases your visitors are using.

Each of the pages cost a minimum of £10 (£30 if you want one without text ads along the top) and can consist of just basic text, or can be designed using html. So far, I have created 8 of these full page ads, the first being for Cashback Shopper.

The first step is to choose a key phrase that will suit your site. Each pages’ URL is that key phrase, so you need to check what is available & what hasn’t already been taken. For Cashback Shopper, I chose cashback shopping site and since it was created on 23rd February 2008, it has received 593 unique visitors, directed from many different sources.

I’ve also set up pages for each of the My Travel Extras products:
airport hotels uk airports
airport lounges uk airports
airport parking uk airports
cheap car hire search
cheap flight tickets
discount london theatre tickets
short breaks

which have not yet received any visitors from the search engines (as they’ve only been live for a few weeks), but are receiving visits from other pagerank10 users.

It’s got to be something to celebrate, even if Yahoo only makes up a tiny fraction of the search market nowadays – something like 4% in the UK according to an article in Web User magazine. But what the hell, Top Spot is still Top Spot )

Cashback Shopper has just achieved the number 1 position for all the following keyphrases on Yahoo:

• shop cashback
• shopping cashback shopping
• shopper cashback
• shops cashback
• uk cash back
• cash rewards site
• extra cashback
• free cashback
• cash-back directory
• get cashback
• uk shopping cashback
• uk cashback shopping pays cash
• cashbackshopper
• cashback shopper
• earn cash back rewards
• cash back uk
• cash back shop
• cash back directory

and is in the top 10 results for 19 other keyphrases!!!!

It’s taken 9 months of constant promotion, blogging, marketing, seo etc. but it’s a nice feeling when the results are so visible. Will keep working at phrases that aren’t doing so well & the key objective is to start making a bigger dent in the Google SERPS!

The best Google positions currently achieved are:

cash rewards site 7
cashback shopper 1
cashback shopping 3
cashback shopping site 7
cashback site 3
cashback uk 9
earn cashback 5
extra cashback 4
shopper cashback 1
site cashback 4
uk cashback 2
uk cashback shopping 2

with 17 other phrases appearing in the next 2 pages of results.

MSN is a strange creature; I have about 13 top ten positions, but only 2 other phrases in the next 2 pages and a dozen or so ways down in the top 100! But with a only 3% of the search market, it doesn’t really matter anyway.

So, the aim now is to find the most searched phrases (& those with the highest KEI) from all these on Google & give them a real push to try & get them to the top!! With lots of FREE traffic up for grabs, this is the most important task for any affiliate marketer!

I blogged previously about articles & how important they were becoming in the fight to improve natural search engine rankings http://www.freshwebz.co.uk/blog/?p=25.

I decided to use a local, UK based company I found, Maa Designs, that have a very professional looking website & offered to write 400 word articles at a cost of £5 each. I paid half the cost up front for the articles & waited to see what turned up.

Oh dear!

Their website claims to produce “High quality, readable and unique web content” & “professionally written, keyword-rich, up-to-date website content that draw visitor attention“. However, the articles appear to have been written by someone whose grasp of the English language & grammar is not great!!! /

The content provided does not flow and there are spelling mistakes & grammatical errors despite their claim “We submit the articles to your website only after checking for grammatical errors, clarity, spelling mistakes and consistency“. I guess this is just another example of you get what you pay for!

The article supplied for Cashback Shopper is reproduced below as an example of the work offered! I think I will be withholding the other half of their payment!

Maine text:

Add new definition to your shopping habits with CashbackShopper.co.uk. This time as you make your budget try shopping with us. Later on as you make a comparison with your earlier expenditure you will find lots of difference. You will realise how you have got many offers and cheaper rates on the same stuff that you always buy.

Curtail your budget with CashbackShopper.co.uk. We offer you with all possible options for Cashback Shopping and you can save lots of money with us. You are welcomed to join us all for free. Added to this, as you join us, you get £5 Welcome Bonus and another £5 for each friend you refer to our website. With this offer in hand you can shop with over 1000 leading UK Online shops. We make you shop at all the online shops and high street retailers. The list includes Currys, Tesco, Boots, Littlewoods, Prudential and many more of same cadre.

With is it is very obvious to get discounts and cashback from 1200+ Shops. This automatically saves lots of money. As you shop wit us, you get everything you want just at a click difference. You can be a part of all easy and comfortable shopping just in 3 Steps to CashbackShopper. As you join CashbackShopper all free, instantly you get £5 free cash just for signing up. Then through the links that we have got you can shop to all your favourite places. As you finish shopping we pay your cashback through paypal or BACS from our huge range of stores, all free of cost.

As you shop online with us, you are free of all the hassles of visiting the high street. It has been discovered that internet shopping sales have reached £4.5bn as compared with £2.6bn last year. With all these setting trends over online shopping it is better to earn moneyback on all the purchases that you make. And this is possible only with CashbackShopper.co.uk. Added to this we give you the chance of earning more money back on a wide variety of products & services you buy throughout the year.

We privilege you with new discount codes; extra cash back offers & special announcements every day. For all these you just need to give a regular look at the Cashback Shopper blog. The difference that you will get with us is of the special offers & discount codes that make your purchase even cheaper. Added to this, at CashbackShopper.co.uk you get the latest offers, exclusive deals, and fabulous Discount voucher codes as well as cash back, something that you can never deny to have.

You will be surprised to know that at CashbackShopper. there is absolutely NO catch! As online retailers pay regular commission to websites for introducing customers; unlike other websites, we share this commission with you, instead of keeping it for ourselves.

I posted the cashback shopper rankings about a month ago & then revealed that all my rankings had taken a big hit on Google & Yahoo, which I now suspect to have been because the site had reached 6 months old & had lost the “new site bonus” that Google (& possibly the other search engines) awards to new sites.

Continuing with normal SEO efforts seems to be moving the site slowly back up the SERPS & it has even improved on some phrases (albeit disappearing on a few others!), so I’m hopeful that continued efforts will get the site back onto the top 3 pages for more keywords. The current positions are:

Google

cash back shopping 33
cash rewards online 1
cash rewards online shopping 5
cash rewards site 8
cashback deals 47
cash-back directory 13
cashback from shopping 13
cashback online 21
cashback shopper 1
cashback shopper site 1
cashback shopping 44
cashback shopping site 18
cashback site 3
cashback sites 18
cashback uk 54
deals cashback 44
earn cashback 6
extra cashback 2
get cashback 45
online cashback 35
pay cashback 36
paying cashback 24
rewards cashback 33
rewards online 5
rewards online shopping 8
rewards online shopping site 6
shopping cash back 11
shopping cashback 10
uk cash back 31
uk cashback 17
UK cashback shopping 14
UK cashback shopping site 32
UK shopping cashback 26

Yahoo

cash back shopping 1
cash rewards online shopping 10
cash-back directory 24
cashback from shopping 14
cashback online 10
cashback shopper 1
cashback shopper site 1
cashback shopping 19
cashback shopping site 9
cashback site 21
cashback uk 48
earn cashback 33
free cashback 5
get cashback 6
online cashback 2
online retailers 35
online shopping site cashback 2
pay cashback 14
paying cashback 16
rewards cashback 29
rewards online shopping 21
rewards online shopping site 11
shopping cash back 23
shopping cash rewards 18
shopping cash rewards online 7
shopping cashback 2
shopping rewards 18
shopping site 35
shopping site cashback 3
uk cash back 25
uk cashback 4
UK cashback shopping 6
UK cashback shopping site 5

I did say I would be writing about the ups AND downs of affiliate marketing & today is the turn of a considerable down followed by a slight up!

I wrote previously about how well Cashback Shopper was doing in the rankings, but within days of that post, my rankings took a big hit from both Google & Yahoo ( With drops of up to 60 places on Google, I was astounded & quite disappointed.

I have read a recent rumour that there is a new -60 penalty that Google applies to websites in which it has lost trust; defined as sites that are guilty of spamming! However, the definition of spamming in this case seems to be that many of the websites that seem to have been penalised, had many inbound links from websites that linked to them from every single page of their website (so-called site-wide links). Sitewide links are an indicator of paid links, which Google sees as an unwanted way to artificially inflate search engine rankings.

Although I have not carried out such a campaign, I recently had Cashback Shopper added to a large number of directories and although all of these were free directories & spread over a few months, I believe it is possible that the number of new links may have grown too fast & Google has become suspicious. But, although I have taken a big hit, now is a time not to panic & give the rankings time to recover.

It is interesting how the different search engines look at websites….for example, for the phrase “cash back shopping”, on Google my ranking has plummeted from 14th to 65th, but on Yahoo it has risen back to 1st! In general, my rankings have improved in Yahoo, but deteriorated in Google. I’m sure that this is because Google looks at the relevancy of the inbound links & the directory entries, while valued by Yahoo, are deemed irrelevant & possibly even negatively by Google.

So, the idea now is to find linking partners that are relevant to cashback & work on recovering my Google rankings, which seem to have stabilised now.

I have also been adding linked key phrases from the Cashback Shopper blog, which may also be classed as site-wide links, so I will remove some of these & see if this makes any difference over the next few weeks.

But, if this penalty for paid links really exists then even websites that follow Google’s rules can get in trouble. Your competitors could harm your website simply by buying links or by creating mini-net websites with site wide links to your website. Instead of penalising seemingly “bad” links, Google should simply ignore them. That way, people could not harm competitor websites.

A while back I bought the domain cashbackshopper.co.uk for my cashback internet shopping site, which offers cash to members who buy products online from our wide range of retailers.

I had looked for the cashbackshopper.com address but found it was already owned by another company, but not in use. There are a number of companies out there that bought hundreds, if not thousands of domains & then sell them on, or wait for them to become valuable/desirable & therefore worth a lot of money!

I wrote to the company & as is the norm in these cases, months went by with no response. I decided it wasn’t worth pursuing as it would make little difference to my UK site.

However, out of the blue, the company contacted me & said they would be willing to sell the domain for $3000 (£1500). Apparently, an American cashback site had offered to buy it & I suspected they were trying to start a bidding war. Interestingly they told me that eDealsUK were planning to launch an American version of their site, with the possibility of a white label offering to follow! This made a big difference as a .com domain would be very useful for a US market & I didn’t want to have to think up some other name, bearing in mind it was likely to already be owned by someone else anyway!

I contacted eDealsUK to confirm what I’d been told & then started negotiations. Amazingly, there was no bidding war & I finally got the cashbackshopper.com domain for £1000 ($2000). I was worried at first, about spending such a lot of money on a name, but was re-assured by a couple of the posters on the Affiliates4U forum, that they felt I’d got a good deal )

So, I now have the cashbackshopper.co.uk domain for the UK market & cashbackshopper.com for the US site when it launches. No definate date yet, but the good thing about having the brand is that they can be linked so that if a user visits from the “wrong” country, they can be redirected to the right site!

In my previous blog(!), I had recorded details of Cashback Shoppers ranking position for various keywords. However, as that information has been lost forever ( I’m posting the rankings here for the first time!

Bearing in mind that Cashback Shopper was only launched in November 2007 & the amount of on-site optimisation was limited to just the front page by the original control panel provided by eDealsUK, I’m pretty pleased with how the site progressed. However, following a major rankings update by Google, the site slipped in and out of the results for a few weeks, but seems to have stabilised again now.

First of all, the site jumped straight into the Cashback News top 20 most visited cashback sites with an Alexa (Alexa rankings are only a rough indicator of how popular a site is) ranking of 400,468!! This put it above NHS Cashback (21st) & Cashback To You (26th), which are both run by eDealsUK themselves! As well as this, Cashback Shopper is the highest Alexa ranked white label site registered on Cashback News!!

Over the past couple of years there has been an explosion in the number of cashback sites & Cashback News tracks the major news from the UK’s Cashback sites.

Their top 20 as at 31st March 2008 is:

# Quidco 25,348
# Rpoints 76,403
# GreasyPalm 77,747
# Give or Take 81,311
# Top Cashback 116,208 – ↑1
# MutualPoints 119,432 – ↓1
# eDeals UK 167,891
# Free Fivers 197,208 – ↑2
# Cashback Rewards 205,521
# Linemypocket 246,858 – ↑4
# MoneyBackMadness 249,117 – ↑1
# RupizCompare 265,300 – ↑5
# Cashbin 270,200
# eCashBack 287,635 – ↑19
# Comparison Plus 299,291 – ↑15
# CashbackChief 321,828 – ↑5
# Cashback Junction 333,294 – ↑6
# trollyCASH 375,873 – ↓7
# CashbackCascade 397,672 – ↑9
# Cashback Shopper 400,468 New

As some of the sites in the Top 20 have been established for many years & are all unique cash-back websites rather than white labels, I’m very pleased with my Search Engine Optimisation efforts so far )

Since this chart, the control panel for Cashback Shopper has been updated to Version 2 and allows for much more customisation of other pages. This can only benefit my SEO efforts & I look forward to the next chart which is due at the end of May.

But although this is nice to see, the most important “chart” is the one known as Google (plus Yahoo & MS Live Search!). So a regular rankings check on popular keywords will show how my site is doing in the search engines & what they think its value is for these key phrases.

Google
cash back 38
cash back shopping 14
cash rewards site 9
cashback 36
cash-back 39
cashback from shopping 48
cashback shopper 1
cashbackshopper 1
cashback shopping 15
cashback shopping site 12
cashback site 3
cashback sites 4
cashback uk 12
earn cashback 6
get cashback
online shopping uk 38
online shops 87
shopping cash back 11
shopping cashback 10
uk cash back 6
uk cashback 5
UK cashback shopping 4
UK cashback shopping site 11
UK shopping cashback 6

Yahoo
cash back 42
cash back shopping 1
cash rewards site 83
cashback 77
cash-back 44
cashback from shopping 23
cashback shopper 1
cashbackshopper 1
cashback shopping 13
cashback shopping site 5
cashback site 19
cashback sites 16
cashback uk 27
earn cashback 15
free cashback 6
get cashback 6
internet shopping 81
shopping cash back 11
shopping cashback 2
uk cash back 10
uk cashback 6
UK cashback shopping 7
UK cashback shopping site 4
UK shopping cashback 9

Following my long & ultimately disappointing experience of building a cashback site, I was browsing through the posts on the Affiliates4U forum & noticed a posting by Nadeem Azam, offering a “white label cashback site”, with a 60% revenue share for life! The white label was being offered by eDealsUK, who had been running their own highly successful cashback site for a number of years & was offering this with no set up fee or charges, other than a 40% revenue share. In short, they only benefit by helping you to do well ) There’s loads of information about their scheme at http://www.cashbackpartners.com

I contacted Nadeem & set the wheels in motion. Choosing a domain name was a challenging proposition as I assumed that anything with the word cashback in it would be used, or at the very least, be owned by a company that would expect a considerable amount of money for it. However, after trying a few “far too clever” options, I tried cashback shopper & found it was available as a .co.uk domain, for just £2.99 per year! Naturally I snapped it up as having keywords in the domain name is excellent for SEO purposes.

The site itself was set up very quickly by eDealsUK & was set up to point to cashbackshopper.co.uk. Then the real work began!!!!