Merchants and affiliates alike, rely hugely on the development and accuracy of affiliate tracking technology to ensure that sales and commissions are precisely recorded. There’s nothing more frustrating for an affiliate than finding out a commission has been missed due to a letdown in technology – for merchants and networks this can mean negative PR and even the loss of earning affiliates. After all, who wants to be part of a network that doesn’t accurate track the visitors and sales you make for a merchant or product?

Many affiliate networks use a small and unreliable variety of methods to ensure clicks and sales are tracked through their networks – in many cases becoming dependant on cookie tracking which, although easy to implement, can often be highly inaccurate and unreliable for affiliates, in some cases losing up to 27% of sales generated.

MoreNiche is known for its existing patent pending MixiTrack™ technology which uses a mix of four different tracking methods. This week sees the launch of Trusted Sites – another string to the MixiTrack™ bow. Trusted Sites means that sales can be tracked simply by the referral traffic to the merchant landing pages. On its own Trusted Sites is an excellent tracking feature however combined with the existing MixiTrack™ technology means that MoreNiche offers the most powerful and comprehensive affiliate tracking software available.

Andrew Slack, Managing Director for MoreNiche commented that “Affiliate marketing is an actively growing sector and technology should grow to accommodate this flourishing sector”. He went on to highlight that “MoreNiche already has a market leading method of tracking providing piece of mind for all our affiliates and merchants however to maintain our high standards and stay ahead of the competition, our proactive approach to affiliate marketing allows us to offer something that no other affiliate work does”.

After the chatter around Caffeine's arrival prompted speculation that page load speed could become a factor used by Google to rank search results, software engineer Matt Cutts has put the record straight in his latest video.

In it, he responds to a user query centred on the importance of page load time and "recentness" compared to a website's content relevancy. Cutts emphasises that the latter remains the most important factor in Google's search results, though he acknowledges the pertinence of a given website's load time.

"If you have 2 sites that are equally relevant (same backlinks … everything else is the same), you'd probably prefer the one that's a little bit faster, so page speed can be an interesting theory to try out for a factor in scoring different websites," he remarks.

"But absolutely, relevance is the primary component, and we have over 200 signals in our scoring to try to return the most relevant, the most useful, the most accurate search result that we can find. That's not going to change," he continues.

Caffeine, the updated version of Google's "search architecture", increases the speed at which the engine can index website content, which is what led analysts to suggest webmasters "help their sites along" by making them as fast and user-friendly as possible – within reason – while maintaining content relevance.

At the end of last year, Cutts also hinted in a video interview for WebProNews that speed could make its way into the engine's natural search algorithms: "It's sort of fair to say that if you're a fast site, maybe you should get a small bit of a bonus. If you really have an awfully slow site, then maybe users don't want that as much."

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