The first step of the audience engagement funnel is often the most important one. When it comes to websites that often comes down to SEO, and how well your site works with the marketing and bot ecosystem, and increasingly how it works with AI’s.

This update focuses a great deal on improving how Affino and your digital presence works with the global bot ecosystem. Affino pages are now served more intelligently to bots, with improved meta data and sitemaps, and they can inform bots which pages are updated or not since they were last checked.

Affino now gives you control over what bots you do and don’t let interact with your sites. This is crucial as over 95% of the site traffic, often 99% of the traffic, is bots. They can both be beneficial, e.g. Google Search indexing your site(s), or detrimental if for example scraping your site to put the content into a competing AI.

For more details please see the release notes:

www.affino.com/blogs/social-commerce-blog/affino-8035---the-...

We are introducing Topic URLs into Affino for the first time. Topic Filtered pages now have Screen Names and are indexed independently by Google, Bing, et al. This means for example if you had a Fish News page, previously all filtered versions would simply have had the same URL and page rank. Now each filtered view, e.g. News/Cod and News/Plaice will have its own Canonical URL and page rank with far more targeted content. This will significantly evolve how search engines index and rank your pages and should lead to improved targeted rankings for all single-topic filtered pages.

The new Bot Access management and updated Bot Access Logs, give you control over what bots you do and don’t give access to your site(s). You can see which ones are well or badly behaved. The introduction of ’If Modified Since’ means that Affino now informs bots if they have already indexed the current version of a page, we are hopeful that this should lead to less peaky site loads as bots no longer try to scrape old content.

We are introducing two major new feature enhancements to Affino for site access and authentication. The first is Magic Links. Users can now be sent links and simply click to log in to the site, with limited access rights set on the Magic Link. This is great for running events, whereby you can provide fast access to secured live streams and content. It is also great for marketing promotions with limited time access.

The second authentication enhancement is the new Handoff API. This means that users logging into Affino can now be seamlessly logged into 3rd party sites using a combination of Affino’s User API, CRM API and the new Handoff extension.

When you look at the full breadth of Affino’s authentication and access control, it is now one of the most feature-complete solutions of any available on the market today, supporting as it does: Logins, Metering, Auto-assignment from email domains and IP Addresses, Subscription fulfilment, two-factor authentication, 3rd party login authentication, and now Magic Links and seamless handoffs.

This release sees a greatly enhanced Broken Links Analysis report so that you can focus on specific timeframes for broken links as well as filter by a number of links threshold, meaning you can quickly focus on the important links.

Article Link Tracking has been rewritten from the ground up and now supports internal and external links and provides a breakdown of each individual who clicked on them (and can now be added to contact lists).

Two other areas which see major improvements are Public Profiles and Awards. Public Profiles see the introduction of a new Advanced high-impact profile template. You have the choice of upgrading the whole directory or selectively promoting individuals to the premium profiles.

Awards see a transformation in usability, messaging and management, with dozens of improvements throughout. We have added information packs, improved the impact of the messaging, transformed the management with many new shortcuts throughout. Entries can now be archived or deleted, can contain pre-defined drop-down options, have word counts enabled / disabled, and in general all aspects of the awards have been refined.

Behind the scenes, we have introduced an AI architecture to Affino following an extensive R&D focus since late last year. Initially, we have launched a set of Specification and Support AI Bots, along with a new Demo Bots which we will be training and refining in-house. 

We are open to explore any Affino-based AI project at this point, and have architected a new set of core Affino-based AI services for launch in the second half of 2023.

Other areas which see nice enhancements in this Affino update include Sales Targets, the Analysis Dashboard with added login metrics, Events, Forums, and the Message Template Builder. In all there are over 270 updates in this release.