I have moved on from BANS, which is the Build a Niche Store script. Google just beat that script to death and cost me a lot of money. I have a lot of domains expiring in the next two months that are banned from Google. The reason I was so sad about Google’s treatment of BANS is because it made some great money. I was jaded for a while and made my own script, which worked ok. The site stayed indexd, ranked well, but didn’t convert as well as BANS. So I was on the hunt again.
The first thing I tried was to install BANS on one of the domains where I had the custom script running. I wanted to see how Google reacted. Previously the site ran Wordpress with a custom script by me, and did fine in Google. I installed BANS and in 3 days my rankings TANKED. I scrambled to remove BANS before it got deindexed. It is now running WP again and is slowly recovering. So I have now scraped BANS forever. I’m tired of gambling every time I launch a niche store. I still do fine with Yahoo traffic and BANS, and will keep up my old sites, but will not use BANS on any new sites.
My personalized setup was working, but was leaving me disappointed. I set out to find something better (I’m not a great coder or designer). I found phpBay, which I’ve been ignoring for a while. The traditional models most use with this script is to create a review site that features eBay listings. This was nice, but I wanted a “BANS like” site, so I set out to create a site powered by Wordpress that functioned a lot more like a “store” than it did a blog. I created a site recently to check out its performance. I purchased a brand new domain. I SEO’d a theme for the store. I did some keyword research. I then launched a site with about 20 pages and minimal content (not spammy, but 50 to 100 word product descriptions). Since the site uses Wordpress, you have a ton of options. Although the site has no more content than a standard BANS store, it looks legit, and that’s key.
So I created a site and gave it a few links to test it. Here is what you get.
I launched the site and it got indexed late on the night of the 6th. Right away I got the freshness / markov boost you’d see on BANS site. Once Google got over that part, the rankings tanked and so did the traffic. I sent it a solid link during this down time and in a few days Google started indexing more than its homepage and indexed my deeper pages. I believe the fresh/markov effect took place again on each of these pages, which pushed a lot of traffic to the site. Again, the traffic tanked but fell to an amount higher than the previous amount. Since then the traffic has increased at as steady rate.
So, the question that you should be concerned about, does it make money? We’ll it’s a little early to say, but I have a positive feeling about it. Here is a screenshot of the clicks and money the site has received in the past 10 days (the graph shows the 3rd, but eBay won’t report the income until the middle of today)
The site has made $15.95 in the past 10 days, which is an average income that is a little higher than $1.5 a day. That’s nothing to brag about, but considering this is a 1 month old site that has already hit the $30 to $45 a month mark and required minimal effort, I cannot complain. I already have a site in this niche and I know how well it converts. It makes $300 to $500 a month regularly and I believe this site will make more.
I’ll keep you guys updated on the performance. I will also be creating a series of “how to” posts on setting up phpBay on Wordpress. I’ve seen plenty of sites that talk about phpBay, but I’m a little disappointed with their advice and methods. My store uses Court’s “sniping” method in its theme and the items are displayed a lot like Build a Niche Store (but don’t look like a tacky spam site).
Related Posts:
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Adsense or phpBay For Niche Sites
{ 21 comments }
Will defintely be looking forward to your phpbay series. It is something I have been procrastinating to try.
yeah, I put off phpbay for a long time after being burned by bans, but I like it so far.
Hey Justin,
Thanks for sharing this info man. It is really a great help in deciding my next step. I have been using adsense on some sites and I am ready to try something else.
Justin – is this a new WP theme that you created or did you use one of Court’s themes and add phpbay?
It’s not a “new” theme, but it isn’t one of Court’s that I’m using. There are a few other phpBay sites that use the theme, bit I made a few changes to it to improve its SEO. I’ll put it up soon.
I’ve always preferred phpBay over BANS and I had some phpBay sites. That’s until I decided that ePN is simply too full of s**t. They do whatever they please, I’ve even had my commissions taken away after being paid in my Paypal account.
They are simply not worth the time (in my personal opinion). I prefer to promote a solid company like Amazon. At least I know I will always be paid, and they will never tell me that my leads are not good enough.
Yeah, I’ve seen people complain about EPN before, but I haven’t had a problem with them yet. I hope I never get burned.
Its like Paypal. Paypal is used and enjoyed by so many people, but the royally screw people sometimes.
I use phpbay as well. No problems with any of my sites being deindexed but do you think it could be detectable by G ? Is there a footprint similar to BANS?
I think it’s a little early to tell, but I think the footprint is less than BANS. First, it uses WP as the CMS, which is one of the most popular CMS, so no reason to worry about that footprint. The footprint phpBay leaves is either through it’s output or the plugin folder. phpBay cloaks links and even cloaks images.
I went as far as placing a index.html file into my plugin folders and other folders that were “open”. I then used robot.txt to block access to the my plugins. I removed any “powered by” links.
The I think its important to provide enough content to get away with the duplicate content from the feeds. I put non-spam content on each page. I don’t keyword stuff like I did on BANS or bold keywords. It’s keyword rich natural language. I then add “articles” to my sites, which are non-store pages with 400+ words of just content.
I am currently BANS all the way but have just recently written a PHPBay style plugin for WP that fully geotargets the auctions out of the box which is a real sore point with both BANS and PHPBay.
I have also written a mod for BANS that does the same, although you have to remove all category numbers from the store pages to get it working properly as eBay don’t share the same cat numbers across each country store.
I will be converting one of my BANS stores to my PHPBay script and WP soon to see what the difference is.
I will be awaiting the PHPbay series to see how you made it different to BANS and how you SEO’ed it.
Hey, that look very interesting!
Sadly, the site got sandboxed today. My rankings in MSN and yahoo stayed the same, but my rankings in Google are -90 or so.
Interesting read and now i’m off to search about other articles on BANS. I wasn’t aware, and didn’t even consider, there might be issues with google and the way it indexes these sites. Thanks for the heads up.
Google a while back banned a ton of sites running the BANS script =(
Was no fun for us who had a lot of them.
PHPBay is definitely working well for me. I haven’t perfected it to the point where its compensating for lost BANS income but with a little bit of time and effort I should be able to get there.
I’ve been doing extensive testing with it because the first site I got ranked in a day got banned 24 hours later.
I follow Frank @ Optempo’s method of having 2 paragraphs of content, then 2 lines of ads, then content then 3-4 lines of ads.
Yeah, my BANS are still making more money than phpBay, but I just started these sites. Maybe I’m pushing it too early, but I’m have great results so far.
I need to check out Frank’s method. My “store” pages are fairly thin on content, but I’ve been performing well. I’m sure to add “articles” though that are pure content and no ads.
I love phpbay. I’ve always used it out of the gate instead of BANS.
On my sites I set up the main content as Pages. Other content comes in the form of posts.
I believe that one fo the huge factors that have helped my sites is the Search-2-Post plugin. Anytime someone types in a search it creates a new post that pulls in the ebay listings related to the keyword.
This translates to my visitors creating posts for me…on a consistent basis. Sometimes I get 20 searches in a day (and thus 20 new posts). I cannot recommend this widget more highly. You can see from this screen cap (http://screencast.com/t/24w6eaesJ) that one one of my new sites I installed this bugger around 2/14 and the results since then have been great.
You gotta use a plugin like MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer so that you don’t send out a ping to your ping lists whenever people run 10 searches in a row or you might get your feed banned.
I also use the Autoblogged plugin and create a “What People are Saying about XYZ Product” catagory. Pump in a feed for my keyword from Search.Twitter.com and you have more variety going.
Every now and then publish a review about your product or something to keep enough original/unique and your golden.
The only major setback is the lack of quality 3-column themes that come out of the box geared towards e-commerce. I use Congo Blue..and it works alright, but I wish I could have something like the layout at http://www.trinityairsoft.com/ that comes with 5 color selections or something. (and 3 columns)
Justin,
Sorry to hear your site got sandboxed. That seems fast. But at least it did not get de-indexed.
I am really interested in your eBay results.
Are you using your previously discussed eBay sniper site with phpBay plug-in?
Google’s being funny with it. It was “sandboxed” for 2 days or so, then the rankings shot back up, but lower than it was. They’re likely to be filtering some of my links. I’m now page 2 or 3 for my keywords.
I took a fairly common theme and set it up with the dynamic sniper h1 and optimized the theme. Then I’m using the phpBay Pro plugin.
Hey, that’s great info for sharing, I just try the phpBay, very good script.
Justin, I think the same like you. BANS converts well but google hates it. I’m still looking for a script that converts well as BANS. Phpbay is more like a blog not a store as you said and I don’t think it converts well either.
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