Is anyone else dragging from copious amounts of sunshine, fireworks and Dr. Pepper? I hope your 4th treated you well, and that you encountered plenty of hot dogs, burgers, 7-layer dips, double decker boats, wakeboards, and sunscreen, of course. Now, to the links we go!

Link: Traffic Drops and Site Architecture Issues

Love: myth busters. Google covers a couple important myths here: duplicate content and affiliate programs causing traffic drops. From my experience, duplicate content seems to be one of those issues that is brought up frequently by both clients and potential clients. I think it’s one of those issues that is easy to latch onto since it’s a simple concept to grasp upfront, unlike, say, tossing out the words canonical, static and dynamic. One area where duplicate content can easily reek havoc, though, is in title tags–if you target the same keywords across mulitple title tags (everything else being equal), you will likely see your site drifting in and out of prime ranking real estate.

Link: 5 Common Information Retrieval Myths

Love: myth busters, again (I’m doing my best Joseph Campbell impersonation). Also, getting into the nitty-gritty, academic side of search. Search is information retrieval and infromation extraction. It’s, “let’s crawl the Internet’s billions of documents” and, “let’s rudimentarlity extract information (I know you have to refine your searches still, I see you) from these documents and provide relevant results.” And, like the article says, search is linguistics, cognitive psychology, information architecture, statistics and more. Motto: Something academic nearly always undergirds what’s happening in front of the masses–go be academic, read the “boring” stuff, find out where your field is heading and how you can help yourself and clients get there first. Or, more simply, “there are smarter people than me behind this, what do they have to say about it?”

Link: Social IDs Go Shopping: Kmart and Sears Implement OpenID

Love: OpenID and the ability to skip out on registering for another website. As we have covered previously on this blog, people don’t like having to register and constantly log in to website after website after website. Well, the big boys are finally starting to get it and are slowly adopting the OpenID platform, or some type of single sign-in protocol, with Kmart and Sears the latest mainstream companies to join the OpenID party.

Link: Future of Social Media: The Walls Come Crumbling Down

Love: openness; as in, “Facebook, tear down this wall!” Your social media platform may be an island, but this user isn’t! </rant> Currently, most of the information contained in social media sites is walled off from the rest of the World Wide Web. As the article states, Facebook Connect does allow users to connect and share their information with other sites, but it’s only a fraction of the Internet. Will users continue to silo their information?

Link: The Idea of Free is Radical–So People Are Going to Freak Out

Love: free? How do you survive as a business that creates content, whether video, text, images, et cetera, in the age of the Internet where free is very easy to find? Check out the conversation between Chris Anderson, Malcolm Gladwell and Seth Godin on how free plays and will play a role in business. I tend to agree with Seth Godin–free is already here and businesses need to figure out how to provide enough free content to entice users to pay for the rest.

Link: Achieve High Rankings by Using Your Existing PageRank as Leverage

Love: leverage what you’ve already got for SEO benefit–that goes for anything, take all of that offline information and put it online in the form of a blog, how-to articles, videos, answers on Q&A sites, images and more. It can all be spun. In this case, use the PageRank your website already has to provide valuable internal links. Don’t insert that keyword into the content all willy-nilly–make sure it’s relevant and appropriate. Also, an important principle to take away from this article is that it’s okay, not to mention extremely beneficial, to make edits to the content of your site. Updated content informs the search engines that you’re likely providing even more relevant information about your industry.

This past July Apogee Search took part in Affiliate Summit Miami. Affiliate Summit was started in 2003 with the mission of providing educational sessions on the latest search engine marketing trends and fostering a productive networking environment for affiliate marketers. Throughout the 3 day event Apogee Search helped usher in more support and education for the SEM and Affiliate industries to marketers and consumers alike.

As one of the premiere marketers attending the event Apogee Search’s CEO, William Leake, was interviewed by Affiliate Summit and asked a series of questions concerning Apogee’s place in the market place, as well as his thoughts on the progress of the latest Affiliate Summit. To view the interview click here.

ClickZ:
In the next few months, Commission Junction will be switching from HTML based links to Java based links. While the change should be seemless for website users, it has the potential to be a nightmare for CJ Publishers, particularly the larger ones. Many large, successful affiliate sites have hundreds of links scattered through-out their entire site. Even if they use a solid content management system, changing out each of these links will require a massive amount of work.

The affliate marketing forums are ablaze with furious publishers.

MarketingVOX
A potential AdSense/affiliate alternative from Amazon.

E-Commerce Times
Good overview of the potential pitfalls of affiliate marketing.

Multichannel Merchant
While the advice is geared more generally towards affiliate marketing rather than SEM, it still is solid advice.