May 20, 2008
Last week, I posted about eBay not paying attention to its Affiliates and the problems they are having with the new EPN changeover. Browsing the eBay EPN forum shows that the winds of changed have blown in and they actually have what appears to be some fairly senior representatives, answering the concerns over on the EPN forum. I encourage ALL of you who think your site may be having issues, to go and post on the forum, so they can address the issues. One of the most important things I read is that eBay have enlisted a third party company to validate and track the entire EPN tracking system to ensure there are no issues!
Notables:
Now for the topic of this post…
Warning: If you Buy Expired Domains - KNOW the Domain History and Don’t Buy into a Bad Neighborhood!
As I was going through the EPN Partner Forum last night, one post really caught my attention! The poster was banned from the EPN for quality issues on his site… guess what, it is a BANS site! As you can imagine, I immediately went into overdrive to see if I could figure out why the guy had not only his site, but his entire account shut down! This was the email he received:
Dear Partner,
Thank you for your participation in the eBay Partner Network.
After a thorough review of your account, our team has determined that your account has been generating traffic of low quality as gauged by our internal measures. We wanted to bring to your attention that our team has decided to terminate your account on May 21, 2008. We ask that you please remove you affiliate links within 7 days. You will not be compensated for any traffic associated with your account after that date. As stated in the eBay Partner Network agreement, all pending payments will be complete within 90 days. Please note, you are prohibited from rejoining the eBay Partner Network.
As stated in the ePN Network Agreement Section (L)(3)(i):
(3) Termination by ePN or an Advertiser
i. ePN may terminate this Agreement and your account, one of your websites, your use of a Promotional Method or your participation in a certain Program at any time for convenience in its sole discretion upon 7 days notice. An Advertiser may terminate your participation in its Program or your use of a Promotional Method at any time for convenience in its sole discretion upon 7 days notice.Regards,
The eBay Partner Network Quality Team
Talk about getting sideswiped! I can only hope the guy didn’t have 100 BANS sites going, which would be completely devastating! After reading deeper into the forum message, it looks like the domain itself has been active for some time, but the traffic coming to the site was either incentivised or worse, driven by pornography, warez and cracks for software, ie: A Bad Neighborhood! In the domain owners defense, he had the domain sitting around doing nothing… and decided to put up a BANS site to see how it would work. It was the existing bad traffic that brought the entire thing down…
Steve H from eBay Responded with a few Tips!
Hi,
This is Steve Hartman and I run the eBay Partner Network team. Since I’m ultimately responsible for our decisions around low quality traffic, I thought it would be appropriate for me to answer this one directly. We’re taking action on the lowest quality traffic which in this case only affected a very small percentage of publishers and was specifically related to low value ACRUs. The reason that we’re taking action is that we want to keep paying our affiliates competitive rates for valuable traffic….
Which continues with:
While I’m on the low quality topic, we’re also spending a lot of time and energy on catching and kicking out people who are trying to fraud eBay Partner Network. I’d honestly use 0% of my team’s resources on this if I could as I’d rather spend more time helping our good affiliates build their businesses. However, there are people out there who are trying to steal money from eBay, which is also money that we could pay to the rest of you who are running legitimate businesses.
To wrap it up, thanks to all of you who are building strong affiliate businesses on eBay Partner Network. I’m looking forward to sharing success with all of you and I’m going to have my team take the appropriate actions to make sure that we have the best opportunity for that shared success.
Thanks
Steve
Further down, another forum poster asks him: Is there any way you could give us an example of what you mean by “low quality traffic” and how some are ripping eBay off?
His Response:
The traffic quality question really has to do with whether your affiliate marketing is having its intended effect and is driving incremental bidding & buying activity on eBay, as well as engaged new ACRUs. The clearest example I can give of low-quality traffic is an affiliate site that drives ACRUs who sign up, place unsuccessful bids, and actually never engage and start buying on eBay. A more general example that we have seen which has resulted in low-value traffic to eBay is when affiliates buy bargain-basement untargeted ad network traffic to their sites and then provide links to eBay.The few resulting bids/BINs/ACRUs that we see from this type of traffic generally do not appear to be incremental from traffic that we would see without this type of marketing.
We’re taking action in very clear cases of non-incremental traffic, so if you’re helping to point people to listings on eBay that will interest them, you’re doing fine.
To answer the question at a high level on how people are ripping eBay off, cookie stuffing and manufactured ACRUs are two of the most egregious examples I can provide.
Hope this helps,
Steve
What does all this mean to us?
Most importantly, eBay has no issues with BANS stores running as they were intended to do! If you continue to build sites and drive traffic based on the needs of your visitors, you will be perfectly fine!
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8 Responses to “Warning about Buying Expired Domains - Don’t Buy Into a Bad Neighborhood!”
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Hi Everyone. I have also been following the drama on the ePN forum.
I cant see anyone not knowing where there links are coming from.
From the sounds of it he was committing fraudulent ACRUs. I’d bet ePN picked up on it during the approval process. Some users where manually approved. Thats the only way ePN would see the stats seeing its only been 7 weeks.
Ive started to build site on other hosts to avoid being on a shared server. Just incase.
Another no no is having iTunes affiliate links on a iPod site.
I believe this person was running a site with spam on it, then switched it over to a BANS site.
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For Example:
It appears that the site was also a purchased website with tons of useless blackhat backlinks. Backlinks come from porno sites, illegal crack sites, and foreign sites.
Google’s cache tells a much different story. How long has it been since it was switched over from a BANS site from naked girls, Rapidshare , megaupload links - freeware and shareware applications.
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Even the eBay Rep referenced the quotes made by the other eBay affiliates that mentioned those Poor Quality traffic sources. I don’t know if it’s the traffic that caused the problem - I think it’s the content and information on the site that was using the Spam and Nudity that was the cause.
But you can always test the domain with domain parking before developing it. Just another monster in the closet to look out for when developing old expired domains.
Wow! This is a bad news/good news post.
Interestingly, today I found out that one of my URLs was expired and I never knew it before buying it. I thought I came up with the domain name on my own. Turns out there was a business with the name of the URL I bought and they had previously owned this URL but let it expire.
I found out by looking at my stats and saw a visitor came from a site that had a backlink to my site. I checked it out and saw it was a directory of sites and this company still has this link connected to their name.
I’ve actually got about five URLs that were expired and I never knew it. I set up Google Alerts for all my domains and every now and then get an alert for one of the sites showing that the URL was expired. Just about every expired URL I have was expired for several months before I bought them (thinking I was the first to think of whatever their URLs are).
So, my question now is, should we check every single URL we are considering purchasing to see if it was expired? If so, how much research should we put into it?
Rochelle
I am a similar situation to Rochelle. One of my domains which I believed to be new had expired some time before I purchased it.
Thank you Mark for highlighting this issue. From now on I’ll be more careful about the domains I use for my sites.
p.s. I love this site, you’re doing a great job!
Paul.
where can you find out the history of a expired domain or website? Thanks
Wow. When I first read this yesterday it scared the begeezers out of me. Today things look different!
It’s good to see ebay finally taking action re epn reporting. The grapevine suggests this could be a bigger problem than they’re currently admitting to though.
Hi Everyone,
I have been reading the blog from the beginning of the “12 Week Empire” series started and this is my first contribution. I have been aware of the risk involved in buying a domain name for a few years now so this is no surprise to me.
And yes I said “the risk involved in buying a domain name” not just expired domains. This is because as Rochelle pointed out any domain we rent (as we don’t actually buy the domain) can very easily be an expired domain.
Rochelle asked “should we check every single URL we are considering purchasing to see if it was expired?”. To which I would say ABSOLUTLY! I personally check every domain I am considering getting. Well ok 90% of them as there are some that are just so good that quite frankly I don’t care if they came from a bad neighborhood or not.
What I do to check a domain is to first run site:domain-name on the big 3 search engines as well as Alexa. Depending on what shows there I will then check the domain at Archive.org and see if they have the site listed in their database and if so I will look to see how old the domain is and what type of site was previously on it.
Hope that helps some,
~Jeff C.
I agree with Jeff. I use the GoDaddy auctions to buy $5 expired domain names. I have had no problems so far, and they have actually been my best BANS sites. What I usually do is visit freshdrop.net and look at only the age of the domain that is expired. You will want something with some age on it.
I then use Firefox with the SEOQuake toolbar to check the backlinks, whois.net and archive.org information. You can also check the Google cache if it is still there. I use Yahoo to do a link:www.domain.??? to see any backlinks that are still indexed. I use yahoo as they will show all backlinks, not like Googles picky backlink listings.
If all looks legit and the site is a good match for an eBay category and keyword niche, then I’ll get it.
Once I “own” the domain, I use Google webmaster tools to verify site ownership, set the prefered domain (www or not), submit a sitemap and I have on a couple sent a reinclusion request just in case. It never hurts to go ahead and send them one.
You can also check and have certain pages removed from Google if you want in the webmaster tools section.
Hope that helps a little, it’s a lot of information to try and get ahold of…