Coastal Web Development

Power Indexer

Power Indexer is a plugin that gets inbound links indexed by search engines within hours rather than weeks. Even if you have a lot of inbound links to your site, if the search engines don’t know about them, they’re worthless. Power Indexer is simple but effective at making your link building efforts count for more!

Benefits:

• Increase your rankings by getting pages that contain inbound links indexed faster.
• Enable the plugin and it starts working immediately.
• Uses your visitor’s IP address, not your server!
• Maximum pings per link is configurable.
• Works with caching plugins!

Power Indexer can save you time and money by getting those precious inbound links counting now instead of weeks from now!

FAQ

How does it work?

Power Indexer uses a small JavaScript snippet that ensures pages linking to your
site are indexed faster, helping your link building be more effective and
increasing your rankings! You control how many times an incoming link gets pinged
and can see stats on incoming links from the Power Indexer options page.

There is a secondary option that uses a hardcoded iframe. This is for cases where
you’re finding users coming to your site with JavaScript disabled. It is incompatible
with caching plugins, however.

Power Indexer also rate-limits the pings to occur no more than once every 30 minutes.
It does this in a cache-friendly way by using AJAX to find out if a link should
be pinged or not.

What versions of WordPress does it work on?

I’ve successfully tested it on WordPress 2.5 to 3.0.

Does this plugin help me build links?

No, but it increases your link building ability! If you get a link to your site
but the page its on is not indexed, it won’t help you rank. Power Indexer helps
make the links you DO build count!

I’m using a caching plugin – will it work?

Yes, if you use the JavaScript (default) option.

What’s the iframe option for?

It’s there if you’d prefer not running JavaScript on your site or if you know a
lot of your users don’t have JavaScript enabled. Note that the iframe option is
NOT compatible with caching plugins.

How do I limit the number of pings that are sent?

Settings > Power Indexer. You can change the maximum number of times an incoming
link is pinged. The default is 10.

How does the rate limiting work?

By default Power Indexer limits pings to no less than 30 minutes between. If you
want to change this, edit the power_indexer.php file and change the default_rate_limit
line to the MINIMUM number of seconds between pings. 600 is 10 minutes, 1800 is
a half hour, 3600 is an hour, and 86400 is one day.

Does it ping *every* incoming link?

No, only links that are not from search engine result pages (SERPs.) Bots will
not trigger the pings either since they do no execute JavaScript or index iFrames.

Will my site get banned in Google for using this?

Honestly I have no idea. I don’t see why it would get your site banned, but
please be aware you’re using it at your own risk.

How do I report bugs and request new features?

Please email me directly with bug reports. As for new features, you can email
me those too, although this plugin is meant to be simple to use and un-bloated.

Introduction

This plugin will cloak an affiliate link in a similar fashion to a product called GC Affiliate Cloaker. It essentially spits out some JavaScript that opens the cloaked link in an iframe. Cloaking in this case is not for SEO purposes – it is to shorten URLs so they look prettier and also to prevent other affiliates from stealing your commissions. You can use a redirect plugin to accomplish the same thing, but this is easier as you make the “redirect” just like writing a post.

Installation

Installation is the same as most plugins, and if you’ve used widgets before you’ll know what to do. Please contact me if you’re having difficulty or you think something is broken. Here’s a step-by-step:

1. Download the Affiliate Cloaker Plugin and extract link_cloaker.php
2. Copy the file into your wp-content/plugins/ folder
3. Go to the Plugins menu in WordPress and activate the Affiliate Cloaker plugin

Using the Affiliate Cloaker plugin

When you’re writing a post you’ll see additional options below the posting window. Click the “Cloaked?” checkbox and fill in the URL field with the destination URL (your affiliate link.) If you want to stop cloaking, just uncheck the box.

Screenshots

I personally love Arne Brachhold’s Google XML Sitemap plugin for WordPress. I personally use it on any WordPress install I do. On larger blogs, or blogs where you’re using automated content generators (i.e. posting content in an automated way through XML-RPC) the default build mode will slow down your blog because it rebuilds the entire XML sitemap from scratch every time you create or update a post or page.

There is a second build mode this plugin supports, which is to build via a GET request. For sites that have a lot of posts or do automated posting, this is a great option. It’s possible to schedule the XML sitemap updates to happen at specific times of the day with a simple script that uses an HTTP GET request to refresh them. This will speed up posting, especially for sites that use automatically generated content. Here’s a simple php script that you can schedule via cron to update your sitemaps and send you an email when it is done. Just update the $admin_email variable to where you want the email to go and the $sitemap_link variable to whatever the XML Sitemaps plugin tells you when you change the build mode. Notethat you may need to change the link to include the wp-admin especially if you’re on Wordpress mu – the link the plugin gives doesn’t work (i.e. http://myblog.com/?sm_command… to http://myblog.com/wp-admin/?sm_command…)

Here’s the script:

<?php

$admin_email='info@myblog.com';
$sitemap_link = 'http://myblog.com/?sm_command=build&sm_key=90210';

function getURIContents( $uri ) {
    return file_get_contents( $uri );
}

function generateSitemap( $link ) {
    $ret = '';
    $result = getURIContents( $link );
    if( !preg_match( '/.*DONE.*/', $result ) ) {
        $ret = $result;
    }
    return $ret;
}

$result = generateSitemap( $sitemap_link );
if( $result != '' ) {
        mail( $admin_email, 'Sitemap Generator failed:$result" );
} else {
        mail( $admin_email, 'Sitemap Generator Complete',
                "Completed sitemap generation." );
}
?>

If you get errors related to file_get_contents not being able to load a remote URI, just replace the above function with this, which uses libcurl and you should be ok:

function getURIContents( $uri ) {
    $ch = curl_init();
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $uri);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 10);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, 'IE 6 - Mozilla/4.0' );
    ret = curl_exec( $ch );
    if( curl_errno( $ch ) ) {
        $ret = '';
    } else {
        curl_close( $ch );
    }
    return $ret;
}

Introduction

Clickbank does not have an RSS feed, but they do have an XML version of their products called the Clickbank Marketplace. I wrote a simple backend for importing this XML file and producing RSS feeds, and then wrote a WordPress plugin that will show these feeds on your blog as a widget. Affiliate ID, number of items, campaign tracking tag and keywords are all available. You’re also able to put multiple ad feeds on your blog in different places, provided your WordPress theme has more than one sidebar.

Installation

Installation is the same as most plugins, and if you’ve used widgets before you’ll know what to do. Please contact me if you’re having difficulty or you think something is broken. Here’s a step-by-step:

1. Download the Clickbank Ad Feed plugin and extract clickbank_adfeed.php
2. Copy the file into your wp-content/plugins/ folder
3. Go to the Plugins menu in WordPress and activate the Clickbank Ad Feed plugin
4. Go to Design > Widgets
5. Add the Clickbank Ad Feed widget by clicking “Add”
6. Click “Edit” and fill out the fields, or leave them as the defaults (you will want to fill in your affiliate ID!)
7. Click “Change” then “Save Changes” and view your site

Screenshots

Additional Information

• Keywords are specified one per line and can include spaces. The software will use these keywords to search the title and description fields of the Clickbank product database. If not enough ads are found, it will fill the remaining slots with the most popular ads based on Clickbank’s popularity score.
• Ordering is done by Clickbank’s popularity score. There are plans to add the ability to sort based on commission amount, whether a product is recurring, or gravity.
• Affiliate ID is set in the widget itself. You can have multiple instances of the widget, so you can use different IDs on different sidebars. Note that my ID is rotated through roughly 20% of the time.
• Campaign tracking tags are part of the Clickbank hoplink and can be specified in the widget options. I highly recommend using different values on different sidebars so you can track which ones are more profitable.
• Data updates are done once a day. Clickbank updates their marketplace XML file once a day, so there’s no point in doing it more frequently.
• Clickbank RSS feed access is coming shortly – this will allow you to use any RSS feed reader to include a Clickbank Ad Feed on your site.