A Few of My Most Common Emails… Answered!

First off – thank you to all of you who commented or sent me a personal email in reference to my 25 Things about Mark Hansen post! It was very encouraging and will help me come a bit more out of my friggin shell! :-) Today – I’m actually going to talk ab0ut a few of the most common emails I get… and instead of continually sending the same answers, I will come out of the closet right here and say it!

Are you Still Building BANS Sites?

Rochelle even talked about this on her blog earlier this week…  For myself, the short answer is No, or at least not very often! The long answer is that even though I DO still have some good BANS sites, I’ve lost quite a bit of interest in it since using phpBay and a few other store builder type products.

In my honest opinion.. each has a place where it excels, but with BANS its just too easy to build thin sites that run too high a risk of being dropped from the index. I am also convinced there is something within the bans 3.0 version that is instantly picked up by the Google algo, because I have seen a BUNCH of BANS 3.0 sites that are great quality, but still deindexed. The ONLY bans sites I still work on, are version 2.0 stores upgraded to 3.0, and I hacked quite a bit out of the index and frontcontrol files, to reduce the code print.

Did I give up on BANS? No… the few sites I do still update do OK, but don’t look anything like the types of stores built 1-2 years ago!

The trick for me with BANS or phpBay is to build 1 page at a time, versus mass producing a catalog from the feed. It FORCES you to create a quality page, versus a point and click catalog.

What do You Think of This Site?

Not a day goes by that I don’t get at least one email, asking me for an opinion on a site. 99% of the time, I answer them… and the answer is not always welcome! Here are just a few VERY basic guidelines that I USE on many of my own sites… if your site follows these initial guidelines, GREAT… if not, you may have some more work to do! :-)

Qualifier: If you plan on getting search engine traffic:

1. NO (Yes, Zero) or VERY FEW (I’m talking like 4 or less)  auction or product listings on your home page! Use the home page to inform visitors of all the stuff they are going to find within your site. A short paragraph about each of your categories, with a link to that category is perfect!
2. NO MORE than 4-8 product listings on your site pages! Fill your site with INFORMATION and let the listings serve as a compliment to the content!
3. Eliminate the Pagination on your pages, you know those links that say… < Page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 > next etc at the bottom of the listings. Get rid of them… they do nothing but generate more duped content and take the value away from the original landing page. If you write 500 words of unique content on your page… why do you want that same unique content spread across 10 other pages, nofollow is not perfect and they are still very likely to be indexed anyway!
4. If you use adsense, use just one code block above the fold or in the middle of your CONTENT articles!
5. MAKE SURE your listings are clearly marked as eBay auctions, versus representing that it is your online store!
6. If you are not writing your own content, buying unique content, or rewriting content you find to make it you own… you will get no visitors from search! Period. Cyberhubonline.com has articles for $1.50 per 250 word article. They may not be perfect, but they are unique and a great starting point for you to fill in the gaps and get content for your pages.
7. A good basic structure to use on your listing pages is this:
   1. 100-250 words of unique content on top!
   2. MAX 4-8 listings (I use 4, in a column format, and would only use 8 if they were columnar as well! Listings in the row format carry on too far down the page)
   3. 50+ words of unique content, or summary paragraphs to other categories within the same parent category!

There are many other things I try to do on my own sites, but these are the most basic that will have an immediate impact on your site quality. Do I do it 100% of the time? No.. unfortunately my head runs in too many different directions and I end up playing clean up more often that I like to admit!

Will Google Like This Site?

Again… in my own opinion, aside from sites that are found through triggers the algo, Google will be at least the second person to have manually reviewed your site BEFORE it suffers any penalties! We all do all this work to rank well and beat out many others in the search results… guess what? ALL those people you rank in front of are now jealous, and if they have been working for years to get their site to the top of the serp’s, they will simply click that little button in Google and report your site as spam, which triggers a Google employee to jump in and decide if it is or not!

Google is very aggressively communicating with webmasters and asking them to report sites they think are spam! Just go read at Matt Cutts site for a few weeks and look back through his blog… not one month goes by that he does not plea for spam reports in some form or another! If you don’t think people will report it… read the comments on his posts!

Ask yourself a few questions and you will KNOW if it would survive a manual review:

1. Am I providing unique content that deserves to be in the index?
2. Would the top 20 sites in the same niche, think my site is useful to readers?
3. Are Other Sites linking to mine as a resource for the niche?
4. Would I post a link to my site on Matt Cutts blog comments and ask for a review?

If you answered no to any of them… chances are it wouldn’t survive a manual review.

Will Doing XXXX Get My Site Back into the Google Index?

I will tell you from first hand experience… if the only thing you did was build an auction listing site and it was dropped from the index (Assuming you didn’t go link spam crazy, use blackhat methods, etc) you are gonna have to get rid of it and start over before you request reinclusion! It sucks… but it is what it is!

You can take the route I took and waste hundreds of hours on it, with no guarantee it will be good enough for G, you can accept that it can survivie without google traffic, or you can cut your losses and walk away to build a better site in the same niche and not make the same mistakes, even though you may not have a clue what they were, that got it there. IF the only thing that got it deindexed was that it had bans on it… guess what?

In my own case and with more almost a full year of reinclusion requests on a very clean site, I gave up! I have tried EVERYTHING to get the site in question back into the index and it’s still not there! Sure, Gbot comes in every day and indexes the crap out of the content, but they still don’t list in the engine.

1. I have noindexed all auction listing pages specifically for gbot
2. I have completely blocked gbot in the robots file – but it still comes EVERY day! (Which is just friggin wrong to begin with)
3. I have continued building content that gets linked from other sites at the rate of 2-3 links every week.
4. I added a blog and built blog based content versus any other store type pages.

The list goes on and on to what I have done with this site over the past year of trying… and I finally tossed in the towel and just built a new site, since it is something I am passionate about!

As I add 1 new page at a time, I go back to the old site and 301 the old page to the new site to make sure the friendly engines have a place to send their visitors, and the link juice may or may not, pass over.

What are You Using to Make Money?

Listed from MOST often to LEAST often!

1. WordPress, installed through my Hostgator Fantastico!
2. phpBay for sprinking in auction listings. I noindex ALL pages that contain more than 4 auction listings! 20% discount code: 24D0955707 still active as far as I know!
3. phpOStock for the same… but feeding from the FAST growing Overstock affiliate program!
4. Review Site plugin to give a way for readers to provide feedback and supply a pagfe with MORE unique content! :-)
5. CarP – To grab a feed(s), completely rewrite it, or build mashups. (There is a technical curve with CarP, but once you get it right… its good shit!)
6. Caffeinated Content, for finding topics to inspire me to write my own. The ONLY time I use articles through CC without editing them is when I build the first few pages of a site and want the blog categories to show up and help me with site setup. I don’t delete them when I’m done, I just start adding my own unique content and bury them deeper in the archives, under all my own unique content.
7. CyberHubOnline.com for getting dirt cheap 250 word articles.
8. Sebatian Schnieder (email: info@srsconsulting.de) for HIGH Quality, highly researched and professional articles! They arent cheap at $16 each, but the quality is book worthy!
9. BANS – Yes, on a limited scale, I still use BANS due to its simplicity for building full stores in one click. The trick is to do it one page at a time, by immediately going into your store pages and turning all of them OFF, until you can edit them!

As I was writing this I realized there is ALOT more I use… which just tells me I am scattered again! Time to reel my head in and focus some more!

Mark

Previously Published Articles You May Like to Read:

• Digging Out of The Google Supplemental Index
• Moving Forward from a Bad Week
• eBay Affiliate Program Doesn’t want your Lame Traffic!

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