Some of the questions we received from the first round were relatively short answer questions, so I have decided to post these in a slightly different post format called the “Quickfire Q&A”.  Each one will contain around 2 or 3 Q&A’s combined into one post to provide some juicy titbits of info for those in need of a simple answer.  So today (not yesterday as I meant to!) sees the first Affiliate Doctors Quickfire Q&A.

QUESTION 1 – H1 TAGS

Tom asks the Docs:

“The homepage of one of my wordpress blogs shows my most recent posts. I have altered the template so the title of each post is an <H1> tag.

I have given the home page it’s own title, description, and keyword data.

I’m not too bothered about the blog ranking for it’s own name, so is a homepage H1 really necessary? If so, is it possible to implement an H1 for a homepage showing only recent posts in wordpress?”

From a document structure point of view it is logical on the homepage that the site title is the h1 tag, I would then place your individual post titles (on the homepage) as h2. On the individual post pages have the post title as the h1 tag, these are the pages you want to rank.

QUESTION 2 – LINK CLOAKING

Richard asks the Docs

“What a great idea this site is.

My first question is:

Is it best to cloak outbound affiliate links from my website. At first I thought it was – and so I used a great WordPress Plugin called WP-Affiliate. The idea was to cloak the links so search engines didn’t know they were affiliate links – but then the links just show up as errors in Google Webmaster Tools.

So my question is – should I cloak outbound affiliate links or not?”

Yes always cloak them as there is software out there that looks for affiliate links and blocks them.

I’m not sure of the specific error you’re encountering. Generally I’d say as long as your site has good content and adds to the user’s experience it probably won’t be too much of an issue for Google that you have affiliate links. You may want to keep doing it anyway though as affiliate links are a bit ugly and can be offputting for the user to see.
 
QUESTION 3 – LINK TEXT

Brian asks the Docs:

“Newbie question: Does it matter if I edit the text in a text link? Will the clickthrough still be credited to my account?”

Yes as long as you use the correct affiliate link it doesn’t matter if the text says click here, buy now, more info etc..

Hi Brian.

This wouldn’t affect the tracking on any system I’m aware of. The only issue to bear in mind is that a merchant may only want to used approved copy for text links and if so this should be clear in their terms and conditions.

Editor’s Note

Hope that clears up your questions Tom, Richard and Brian, and if anyone else has something to add, we’d love to hear from you – just scroll down and leave a reply! Cheers.