Now I’ve not played Football Manager for some years now. To be honest Sensible Soccer on Sega Megadrive was the pinnacle of my football gaming ability so any games more complex tended to be quickly forgotten. That, and the fact that Southampton on these games were always crap (how things have now changed).

Anyway, Kelvin’s talk didn’t inspire me to get back in the Football Manager hotseat… it inspired Jude! Shortly after ThinkVis she was at the helm of Newport Country and frequently offering updates about overpaid footballers not doing what they should. She also kept asking me for advice on formations, who she should buy and whether these stats were good or bad. Like I would know! Anyway for a time I was “Director of Football” of Newport County … but that wasn’t exciting enough.

So before you know it I’m manager of Gateshead of the Blue Square Premier League and on course for becoming an SEO master (maybe). Season after season and hour after hour passed and before you know it Gateshead have made it to the Premier League care of a Johnstone Paint Trophy victory, a few Play-off near misses and just one relegation.

The FA Cup followed as did European Football, but the Premiership remained an elusive goal. In fact, it wasn’t until the 29th season when things started to unravel. Selling the England Captain for an astronomical fee to Arsenal unsettled the squad, they all got grumpy and just 8 months before Football Manager would retire me for being “too old”, the ungrateful Gateshead board fired me.

I’m still bitter about that!

Unfortunately all the above took up such a lot of time that blogging was shunted aside. I’m not even sure I know anything more about SEO. In fact I think my brain cells have been destroyed by the lack of sleep, the worry about players who were unsettled and trying to devise a plan to win the Premiership.

One thing that did resonate though was the strategy I adopted during the game. That strategy was to spend as little as possible and see how far things would go. Initially that was easy because the Gateshead Board didn’t have any cash. No players were loaned in for the entire game, and it was only until the final season when I blew £15million on a grumpy Scottish midfielder who’s tantrums contributed to me being sacked.

Now with Loquax the strategy has been quite similar, ok barring spending £15million on a midfielder – no idea what we’d do with him unless he knows SEO. But, you could say that doing silly things that may be outside your comfort zone is something to watch out for when doing stuff online.

Despite being slightly more affluent than we were in 1998, we’re still cash conscious and spending out a load of cash in search of glory may not result in taking honours. Perhaps there was a lesson in Football Manager after all?

Actually there’s another one – a more obvious one – and that’s be your own boss, because after sweating your nuts off for 29 years and delivering success above and beyond expectation there’s no grumpy board waiting to sack you without any warning.

Now! About this SEO stuff????

The cause of this isn’t the fact that our servers are covered in treacle and managed by a bunch of snails who are incredibly relaxed thanks to the benefits of illegal grass type products, but because of our redirect page. We use a redirect link (goto.htm), with php header code, to mask our urls and redirect them. We never used to do this, but after having large swathes of the site “borrowed” on a regular basis it became a necessity.

Clicking on one of our redirects usually results in the outbound link loading in – so why Google was assigning an average over 7 seconds to our redirect goto.htm was a bit of a mystery. Could it be including the time to load the redirect as an indicator of our server response? Or can Google’s site performance data not take into account/identify a php redirect? For the first time I tried the support forum and made a couple of changes including identifying the redirect.

One additional change made since then has involved what happens when the goto.htm id is no longer used. We don’t want our users clicking through to dead sites, so when an id is not in use we redirect to a “sorry not available” holding page. Within that page was some database code that really wasn’t needed. My theory is that if Google is hitting a lot of our old redirects it’s just landing on the “sorry” page multiple times – resulting in multiple database calls and lots of confusion.

So, to counter this, we’ve put a robots.txt exclusion on the “sorry” page (it was already noindex) and, so far, it seems our average speed for goto.htm is now dropping. Hopefully the average will continue to drop and the changes made won’t effect anything else.

According to Blogstorm, site speed is not yet a factor in The UK yet. But, if you do use redirects it might be worth looking at your Site Performance just in case your speed average is being skewed.

And, if you have any ideas/suggestions as to the cause of why Google sees php header redirects as slow then please post below!

Now there’s stats everywhere and already GA has thrown up some stuff we didn’t realise (mainly because we’re lazy and didn’t bother checking before). Popular landing pages have been updated where needed and hopefully that will start paying dividends.

Sites which we thought were doing ok (they weren’t) have also had a bit of a going over based on the excellent wordpress duplicate content penalty fix by KirstyM.

This is perhaps something we should have done a long time ago – but it does go to show that even old time affiliates can be lazy, not take advantage of stats and information available and essentially wander around in the dark running a website. Perhaps not the best plan for newbie affiliates to follow!

Despite this half-arsed attitude we’ve managed to do ok, so perhaps armed with a bit more information and stats we can improve in a number of areas.

So why start using stats now?

The reason is we probably can’t work any harder and in order to do better commission wise we have to start working a lot lot smarter. We now need to know what works and what doesn’t and tailor our efforts accordingly.

In retrospect it sounds insane that we never started out this way!

Let’s see if having our eyes wide open and armed with more stats improves conversions and commissions.

What will the impact be? From a trademark owner point of view we’ll have to wait and see if traffic is effected, however those using our trademark are duly noted.

From a user point of view, personally I find it a little bit distracting and irrelevant. If I want to go to Comet, and search for Comet, I want to see Comet… not Pearl Strings or Shopzilla links.

Users could well become confused or perhaps even annoyed by this decision – meaning that their focus will turn to the white space and the organic search results, which ultimately will be more relevant to them.

Here’s the request:

I recently visited bingo blog and saw bingo forums and thought it was an excellent idea. We believe that good quality content should be networked on the web and I’d be interested in speaking to you about creating a link from it, to our website. I noticed that you have an out going link to jackpotjoy and I wondered if you would consider doing the same for our site http://www.meccabingo.com I believe, and I’m sure you’ll agree that our content would be of great interest to your visitors and would provide a great “next stop” for their web experience. If it would be helpful, we can save you the time and trouble and provide the link code for you. We would also be happy to offer a basic SEO report or SEO optimised page of content as a thank you for the link. If there is anything else I can do or you need to discuss further, please get back to me.

Ok, so why is this a pile of nonsense?

Well, firstly Bingo Blog is just a blog, there isn’t a forum. Yes it’s an excellent idea so at least that’s good and probably the only evidence that they’ve looked at the site in detail. So they want a link to their website… well, guess what? Yes we have a link already! In fact we have several affiliate links pointing to Mecca Bingo! In fact we’ve been promoting Mecca Bingo/Mecca Games for the best part of several years now!

The fact is that quite probably most of the other bingo sites out there already link to Mecca Bingo through their own affiliate links! So, these guys are just doing what any muppet could do in terms of asking for links (i.e no research, no personalised email, no grasp of affiliate marketing etc) – and Mecca are paying for it!

So here’s the point, instead of paying out good money on getting “one of the UK’s leading internet marketing agencies” to ask all your affiliates to link to you, why not just put a bit of time, effort and energy into your affiliate program!? Update the banners, get content and information to your affiliates about what’s happening at Mecca Games and Mecca Bingo, talk to your affiliates (and why not offer a reciprocal link) and provide a competitive offer so that we’ll put your links up higher than other merchants!

Oh, and ask for your money back from your SEO Link Request guys too.