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October 13, 2008
While we have all been trying to get a clear answer on what the eBay Affiliate Program expects from us, there are still many unanswered questions out there! I mean, how the heck can we get our visitors “engaged” if we don’t understand their meaning of the term?! Over the weekend, I found a post on the ePN forums that may have given a small bit of insight into this…
In a post about Roundtripping the ePN (round tripping is a practice of sending an existing ebay visitor to your off-ebay site, then back to ebay, planting a cookie) Will, one of the most active moderators who answer affiliate questions stated:
The main goal of our affiliate program is to bring off-eBay users interested in buying on eBay that would not have come to eBay naturally.
That last set of words truly tells us all one strong message about the ePN - If they would have normally captured the visitors you are sending them, they don’t need you! While it is used in the context of the roundtripping, it clearly states… “The Main Goal….” thus we are not making an assumption, thinking it applies to EVERY scenario with the ePN.
So how do we go about attracting visitors, engaging them in OUR content and then send them to the ePN? Its all in your content, literally!
Rule #1 - Try to FORGET you have an eBay store!
In the past, Google and every other engine LOVED straight up BANS generated pages! Those days are past… and if you have been using BANS for more than 6 months, you WILL have experienced a deindex! Nobodyhas been spared this, including the developers of the software! When I read other blogs saying… “I have not been affected or had any sites deindexed”, it only takes 5 minutes of searching to see they are not quite telling the truth, they just don’t admit it! The time has come to completely forget you have a BANS store on the site and focus on your content. Write informative content on ALL of your BANS only site pages, including those with product listings!
Rule #2 - Write MORE content than Listings!
If you are running a straight BANS site versus a BANS/Blog site, you need to jump right into your setup screen and set it to show 10 or less items per page! After you have that set, visit every single one of your store pages and write 250-500 words of page specific content to each of them! If you don’t have time… make time! :-)
Rule #3 - Attract The Tire Kickers!
None of us want to spend time writing content to attract tire kicker traffic. Tire kickers are the people who only come to read and are not interested in buying anything… guess what, if you write for buyers ONLY, your site won’t survive! After you have the general web traffic coming to your site and browsing your content, you very nicely tell them where they can also buy the items they are reading about! This is where having a blog comes in handy… you don’t have to do everything in the BANS interface!
Recently, Eric Schmidt, Google CEO, stated that the Internet has become a cesspool and is the breeding ground of misinformation! He is referring to the tons of spam type sites you will find everyone putting up every day, and recommends we start building a brand! A BANS site, straight out of the box… will sink right to the bottom of the cesspool and get sucked out with the cleaner! If you want to make your sites float to the top, start by proving unique content and giving users a reason to come back!
Once you have quality content, drawing quality and engaged visitors…. the eBay Partner Network will show you the love you deserve, in your wallet!
13 Responses to “eBay Affiliate Program Doesn’t want your Lame Traffic!”
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It’s a paradox.
There is nothing more organic that a straight out of the box BANS site. Might not look good, but all it has is the products, and that’s what the person at the site is looking for. I think the cesspool is the vast array of misinformation disguised as blogs that are the problem. Anyone can write anything about anything, factual or not.
It’s a pity really.
@ Steve -
I hear exactly what you are saying!
Out of the BOX BANS sites are great for the visitor…. but G seems to hate them due to the dup content issue, which is roughly 99% duplicated content.
The more we mess with them… the harder they become for the visitors to find what they wanted from the main page!
BUT… I see what they mean by it all.
Mark
How can you tell if your site has been de-indexed?? Almost all of my sites except a few that a set up but never built out show that they’ve been indexed when I look them up on site:domainname.com. Even ones that are still a bit on the skinny side.
What really pisses me off about this whole new paradigm is ebay, Google et al telling us what kinds of sites we should be looking at AS BUYERS. As a buyer, there are many many times when I just want to get in, buy my item, and get out. Why should dedicated, TARGETED buyers have to wade thru a lot of crap just to spend their money??
I think that voting with dollars should be good enough for ebay etc. If buyers shop through a site for an item, then that should be good enough. There is no way to know what actually “engaged” that buyer to make the purchase. Maybe it was an article, or maybe it was a glimpse of that item listing for something they’ve been meaning to buy. A dollar is a dollar, whether it’s “engaged” or not.
@ Alice -
Just do a site operator search. ie: “site:mysite.com” and also “site:www.mysite.com”
As for the whole gamut of reasons for the shift in engaged traffic, I have a whole tin-foil hat reasoning behind WHY I think it happened… but again, thats another post!
To summarize:
Google = Largest search engine
eBay = Largest online shopping network
ePN = one of, if not THE affiliate network with the most members.
15000 BANS users * 20 sites each * 100 pages per site = 30 Million pages of SPAM in Googles index! (Yes, its THEIR index, with OUR content)
Google says to ebay… YOUR affiliates are loading OUR index with crap - do something about it, or we will make sure NONE of your ebay.com, half.com, paypal.com etc links, show up in OUR index!
There it is in a nutshell….
Mark
LOL! Yes, I can see how that came about, but even so, this Internet Nazi crap really boils my butt. And 30 million pages out of how many billions are on the net? That’s nothing.
The thing is, this is what you’d expect with a medium that has zero barriers to entry. The thing will sink to the lowest common denominator, which is pretty low (and lots worse that any skinny ebay affiliate site out there!).
If Google thinks it can raise the standards by these manipulations they are sadly deluded. Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel and his buddies and their crappy websites won’t be affected at all, and will continue to pollute the cesspool…
At the end of the day Google determines what we can and cannot do in terms of running successful affiliate sites. If Google loves to deindex out-of-box BANs sites.. then you want to do the complete opposite.
I didn’t catch that thread in the forum - great resource though!
What I find interesting is that I put a few web sites together selling some of WA affilates stuff-the web sites have all been de indexed but the blogs I put together are still up and indexed-so now leaving WA and closing down all the web sites and the blogs-what i will do with the domains is may be park them for awhile not sure if that is a good idea-but i am not going to waste any more of my time spending a small fortune on adwords to see great hits no sales and then google doubles the cost of my keywords-these are the sites that suck and i have been one of those idiots doing this. Now I just concentrate on some bans stores-I only have 5 running at present that only earn $50-$60 a month,but I feel the better side is to go with wordpress and have some sites with bans and many others selling other products-I do have two other problems (1) have cut the amount of products on one of my bans sites-do not have wordpress installed on the site but of course now i have heaps of pages getting 404 -with wordpress it is fairly easy to fix the problem but with a straight web site-for the life of me can not fix this (2) I have a site just set up as a blog,not a bans site at all just a blog-i want to incorporate the wp theme as also the main web page,is the process easy or is it like incorporating bans and word press-any help would be great.
Well when you do the math it really does show how much crap Google has to put up with. I really can’t fault them for getting tough on us if we aren’t willing to put forth a bit of real down home content on our sites.
I have given up on BANS, it is to hard to make some decent money with it, i had BANS sites with tons of fresh content (all my sites where added with 20 unique articles) (± 15 domains with BANS within a week time) and RSS feeds and YouTube movies but still one after the other got banned by Google.
I have relocated the content to other sites and blogs and rebuild the rest of the domains that weren’t banned yet, where i don’t use BANS but affiliate programs and 70% / 80% of these articles and content pieces are ranking nicely for the keywords they where written for,(in total about 300 articles)
My promotion efforts where 100% white hat article marketing blogging and such.
My conclusion is that BANS is a huge red flag for Google and they will not hesitate to trow you out of the index.
Funny how negative comments about BANS are not being accepted, shows the quality of the info on this blog.
@ Dave -
I would never squash comments man… Yours was just held in moderation.
I won’t argue with you a bit on BANS alone sites being a huge red flag… if you go back and read some of the posts since my own sites starting getting deindexed back in May, you will see that. :-)
The key for me however, was to find a way to make them better, so Google DID love them and share their love by sending visitors. Thus… I started converting most of my better performing stores to WordPress and use them not only for BANS, but other aff programs as well.
Thanks for stopping in and commenting, and again… you will find many negative BANS posts here, as well as comments.
Mark
Mark