So like everyone else, I have been having problems with BANS and Google. They seem to be targeting the footprints of that script and yanking them from serps. No too long again, I launched a BANS, filled it with great content, did “safe” link building. It got indexed in a day and I was excited. Two days later it was deindexed and has stayed deindexed. Nothing I can do, but fill reinclusion and pray they let me back.
Well I’ve been sitting around and thinking. First, the Markov engine of constantly refreshing content from eBay feeds is really nice. So are the updating keywords associated with the content feed. I am not satisfied with the Javascript widget thing eBay gives you. Secondly, I’m frustrated with Google dictating my income on these sites. The BANS model was easy money, why does this have to stop?
The solution? Make my own. I am a firm believer internet marketers should have basic skills in the languages of the internet. This includes programming languages like HTML/CSS/PHP. Luckily enough, I was into web design before I got into SEO =P So its time for me to get my hands dirty and do some PHP coding.
I’m going to keep very vague and non-informative about this, but I wanted to share “some” of this. For now, I’m not going to share any scripts I make. I’m doing this because it defeats the purpose of making it. I want to reduce the footprints of my sites, so a custom made script will do this for me. Nobody else out there will be using the same method as me. As hundreds of internet marketers scramble to keep up with BANS and other popular scripts, I plan to sneak in under the radar.
I cannot teach you guys how to program PHP, because it is too much to cover here and way off topic for this site. A few weeks of solid study and scripting and you can have some good knowledge on the topic. Be warned, it is for advanced people only. If you have trouble installing Wordpress, working with Cpanel, databases, permissions, or FTP…. this is not for you. If you’re going to tackle this, I suggest you start searching Google for some good tutorials.
I am working with a script to parse the RSS feed of items from eBay, which is basically an xml file. I’m taking the contents and using PHP to generate HTML output. Unlike the Javascript widget, this method will actually generate textual content, titles, and images that will be readable by search engines. I will include this php script in a page with some original content to fix any duplicate content issues. I will either use a Wordpress blog or another script as a CMS. It’s basically a makeshift BANS replacement.
(I’m excited about the Markov that can be created with the script, related posts plugin and nested comments)
It will take a little more effort than setting up BANS, but I think it is well worth the time. All the traffic that was being captured by 1000’s of BANS sites is now up for grabs because they all got slapped out of Google.
I know this post isn’t “teaching” anything, but I thought I’d share the idea. I know some of my readers won’t be able to do anything with this post, but if you’re a programmer I hope I got some wheels turning. I’m working on a script right now and should be finished tonight. I’m going to launch two sites this week to see how it does. I’m going to launch both a .info and a .com and see how the domains are treated.
I think the important thing to take away is that making money online is about learning how to adjust. SEO is never constant as things fall in and out of favor at Google. As an internet marketer, you need to adjust. And instead of accepting defeat with the niche store model, I want to see how I do without the BANS footprint.
Good luck guys! Sorry I’m not sharing more but I’d be shooting myself in the foot.
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{ 22 comments }
I am in the same place as you my friend!
Doing exactly the same thing!
BANS is good and other WP plugins like PHPBay are also good – but some home cooked coding gets you places and also fills in the gaps that BANS and others leave open.
Good luck!
Nice, good luck with it! =)
Sometimes my scripting knowledge comes in handy.
I’ve heard some good things about PHPBay, but after BANS got slapped I didn’t want to invest too much into something too many people might be manipulating. I think a custom script will do the job.
I have been working non stop for the past 2 weeks on a bans site written in ASP vs PHP. I have stripped out all references to Ebay except for the image locations of the items which I am working on now. I have 2 of the 15 pages indexed so far and am holding the number 1 spot on google for my major keywords out of 440,000 results, its not as good as your case study of 1.3mil results but I’m number 1 so that works.
I have visited the bans site and looked at the user created sites to see what may be triggering google to de-index, and i believe a big chunk of it is the ebay links which i have removed along with the ebay picture locations.
other than that my site is clean of ebay references and I intend on validating the code to add a little more authority to the site. I also will not be adding any google ads or any other affiliate links to this site to see if that may be a trigger.
This will not be a thin site, I have added few other things to make it look like a real store.
I am new to bans and programming to ebay but I believe I have everything coded correctly the only concern i have now is that it tracks my purchases correctly.
Like you I believe custom coding is the way to go cookie cutter programs will get flagged fast.
Yeah, I’m sure the affiliate id tagged links play a footprint =(
I think custom coding drastically improves your ability to stay under the radar. Instead of being able to use algorithm detection, Google will have to depend on reports and manually review my site.
I’m going to test a few different CMS, but it was difficult to include large chunks of text on BANS without looking t0o spammy. Directly working it into something like Wordpress should make it easier to plug in some content.
I’m not in the school that believes “content is king”, but I do believe content is very important.
Ha I messed up my url on that last post LOL sorry.
lol, not a problem =P
Hey Justin, you are completely right. The key here is for everyones stores to be built and coded in a unique way, i coded my own mainly because i’d never heard of BANS, as a result i never lost a store. I think people need to understand how deep a footprint runs, as far as BANS is concerned people need to think deeper than ‘powered by build a niche store’ footer links and more along the lines of what google actually sees, so hit view source and compare two different BANS stores and there are common strings in the source all over the place from CSS class names to the html forms for ebay sorting to filenames, directory and link structures. Even more obscure examples such as in BANS are.. where does item.php take you? What html is returned from the directory yourstorename.com/admin ? Look at the list of files when you type in yourstorename.com/scripts or cont/ ? Even the checksum for the buyitnow image is a footprint, while im verging on the silly here, you only have to take a combination of subtle random factors and you can pick a BANS store out of the crowd really easily.. The upshot is, modifying BANS is out of the question and it is quicker to recode your own from scratch, its a real shame that to share techniques would shoot oursleves in the foot, however xml parsing is not the most complex area of php programming so should be within the reach of a lot of people with a bit of time invested in learning some php which is always useful in this game anyway..
P.S. love the blog by the way..
Thanks so much Rob.
I started first considering how to remove the footprint from BANS. My last site I launched had a completely unique theme. I used different class and id names and a new css file, but the item code is hard coded into the script. Once that site was deindexed, it proved to me that the footprint was deeper than simple themes and “powered by”.
A simple check of /admin/ would give away the script name. After considering all the possible ways to detect it, it sounded like a head ache.
Yeah, I might post some information soon to send people in the right direction. A few minutes of Google’ing will locate pre-made scripts since RSS parsing is common.
I think this is the point where some people might need to step up. I’m not trying to hurt people, but if it is too easy for people, I think it’ll be abused just like BANS.
Yeah you’re right Justin…more work..ugh. Any word on php bay sites being deindexed?
not sure =(
I haven’t gotten into PhpBay
If anyone reading comment knows, feel free to chime in.
One thing that we can not get away from is the fact that at some point we need a link that goes to Ebay, there is no way around this. We either need to have a direct link to ebay which may not be good b/c of the footprint or we need a redirect which looks shady at best.
Myself i redirect to ebay vs having hard links on the site. as far as CMS goes i dont use it, all of my pages are hard coded maybe after I am done I will turn it into a software bundle to rollout other sites…guess I will see.
I see alot of the bans sites with a paypal icon, buynow icon along with number of bids and time left look like big flags to me.
Any idea of how to mask links or a better way to redirect to ebay?
The only way I’ve ever masked links is doing a simple redirect via .htacess. Like my links in my footer that are /go/affiliate are all redirected affiliate links.
The links in the RSS feed provided by eBay are long nasty links. I’m sure its possible to code some redirects that work dynamically, but thats more than I’ll prob do right now.
If you just want to hide the link from your visitors, I think you can use javascript to change what shows in the status bar at the bottom.
I do have some sites where I link to a search instead of bringing in items. When I do that, I just use the same method as /go/ and create a go.php which lists my redirects then use htacess to clean it up.
What do you guys recommend as a good starting place for my PHP education? I really need to start it now. As Confucius says;
“The best time to plant a tree is ten years ago. The second best time is NOW”.
So I’d better get started
Like most other people, I’ve had BANS de-indexing problems. The only BANS sites I own that have been completely unaffected have been the two BANS sites that have absolutely no auctions on the home page. In both cases the home page is filled with content, brand logos and links to store pages. In other words, they look like all the “traditional” stores that sit at the top of the SERPS.
Both stores have been active for 6 months now and while my others have been slapped around all over the place, these two hold steady.
As you may know, I’ve been happy with the EPN JavaScript widgets I use on OpTempo and elsewhere. The CTR and conversion has been consistently good so I haven’t seen a need to change. My basic formula has been to embed the widget directly in the content whenever possible, show the picture, description and price only, the search box (usually prefilled) and show the lowest price first. People just have to click through to see why that $100 widget is selling for $1. The same method can be used for blogs and static mini-sites.
I’ve looked at a few RSS based solutions, including PHPBay, and I haven’t been that pleased with them. Most seemed to concentrate on making a site using them look ‘pretty’ rather than targeting click-thru. Most also included things like time left and number of bids which I think are useless and perhaps even discourage clicks.
Yeah I’ve seen that you use the javascript applet on your site and stuff. I’ve played around with on a couple of my sites and it does ok on some of them. My BANS sites performed better. I wanted to see how they do when its actual HTML vs JS.
And you’re right about all the extra junk that comes in with the feed. It has bid and time information, which would be nice to get rid of. (I’m sure there is a way, but will require more coding time and I’m only so so at PHP)
Didn’t you have a really boring plain theme you made? I considered working in the feeds with a site like that. I wanted to see how ell it converts if its a boring white page where the items stand out.
That was my “Boring Memo” theme. It was primarily for Adsense sites although it could easily be adapted to EPN Widgets or feed plugins. I’ve got another dateless theme that I’m releasing soon that works well also.
I think I work the links the same way as Bans does:
what I do is:
have the link on the website look like this,
http://www.yourstore.com/Something/Something.asp?string=Item Title&string2=1000.00
then i do a second search on ebay using somthing.asp using the title of the item and when it comes back with the info i say:
if string2 = price or string2 < price then redirect to ebay
else
write.response(out of stock)
or something like that…your thoughts??
im still trying to figure out how to extract the Item number so that it will work more exact but for now this works pretty well.
hey justin I shot your a email the other day.
How about some info on how to promote Bans (the safe way).
You might want to get PHPbay a look, because they have an API version. You can take advantage of all the work that’s gone into that product (which is fantastic, IMHO)… and still avoid being stuck with as obvious a footprint as Wordpress.
Hey Justin,
With the last of my BANS sites sites dropping recently. I am in the same position. I do use PHPbay PRO, but my question is…what is your take on the pepperjam store builder? Is this a viable option to replace my BANS stores?
I think I will be staying with my own coding VS. buying one of these products, I launched my store about 2 weeks ago and have 12 clicks to eBay from the site with about 18 Absolute Unique Visitors. The only fear that I have at this point is that the coding is wrong, I have clicks to eBay and 0 commission thus far does anyone know a way to test this so that I can make sure that my coding is correct so I can get credit for the purchases?
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