It has now been several months since the first wave of Ebay Partner Network slaps. Since then I’ve heard many stories of accounts being disabled, both from strangers as well as from friends of mine. Those of us who still have accounts in good standing can’t help but feel a little bit paranoid, especially with the new terms.

If you aren’t up to speed with the new changes to the EPN program, some adjustments have been made that further restrict the types of promotion allowed. One major change is that it is no longer acceptable to drop your EPN links on ANY site that you do not own and have complete control over. This includes social networking sites like Twitter as well as free blogging platforms such as Blogger and WordPress.com. The only exception is if you obtain permission in writing from Ebay Partner Network prior to using these promotional methods.

As a precaution I’ve spent some time the past couple days disabling old links (the ones that I can) that were dropped on sites like those listed above. It’s a bit unnerving to think that although maybe only a handful of clicks are coming from these now illegitimate sites, it is still technically enough for EPN to show me the door. However…

The Bright Side

I’m not sure how exactly this works out, or if it just mere coincidence, but Google traffic on my PhpBay sites is way up. Like 110% up. Of course this is just the past week, so I’m not exactly counting on this being consistent. But I’ve talked to other phpbay site admins and I’m not the only one experiencing this phenomenon.

I’m only speculating, of course, but could it be that the high (and getting higher) barrier for entry to the EPN program as well as the harsh promotion restrictions has caused Google to attribute a little more credibility to phpbay/BANS type sites? It would make sense, since autoblogs and black hat type sites monetized via EPN are now few and far between.

After all, Steve Hartman and the folks at EPN have made it very clear that they are shifting their business model away from quantity and now trying to focus on quality. Wouldn’t it make sense that Google would make a slight algorithm tweak in response to these recent changes?

Maybe it’s just wishful thinking. But…maybe not.

Wisdom Nugget

Also, I’ve gotten some questions from folks asking about how I set up my phpbay sites in order to get a favorable Google ranking. That is a whole different post in itself, but I will say that I’ve seen a ton of them making the same mistake: A ton of phpbay results on the homepage.

When I first started building them, I wanted to of course get as many EPN clicks as possible, so it made sense that I should put clickable auction results on the home page to minimize the time visistors spent on my site and get them clicking through to Ebay as soon as possible.

I learned pretty quickly that that is a very short-sighted mentality, and in the long run you will do much better to have unique content on a pleasant looking site with user-friendly navigation. There is a lot you can do with phpbay to narrow down categories and provide a lot of value to your visitors. I know it sounds corny, but my EPN dashboard makes me feel a lot better about it.

So, keep the results off the front page. Yes, that is a protip.

Edit: It has recently come to my attention that YouTube may no longer be counting autoplay views at all, rendering this entire technique useless. It has been quite some time since I’ve used it myself, so I can’t say for sure. Feel free to test it anyway. In any event, I will leave this post here for historic purposes (and because frankly, I don’t have much content on this blog!)

Recently someone on Wickedfire asked how they could get more views to a YouTube video. I figured I might as well put my response on this here bloggity blog as well.

This will help you get a significant amount of NON-HUMAN views if you do it correctly. Why would you want those? Well, basically the idea is to get so many views that your video starts appearing in the “most viewed” areas and what not, resulting in a ton of real views. A large amount of total plays also adds legitimacy to your video.

The Method

Upload your video to YouTube. Now go create a MySpace account. Proceed to hunt down popular MySpace Music profiles that have a ton of views/fans and that also ALLOW HTML in comments. These aren’t exactly easy to find but they are out there. I’m not going to give you a master list of them, but with a little research you should be able to find some. Just scroll down and check out the comments on any particular profile, and if you see a ton of retarded glittery images embedded then you’ll know you’ve found a winner.

Add all of these bands. Many of the more popular ones have their accounts set up to auto approve incoming friend requests (because it would take forever to do it manually).

Once you’ve got a friends list full of bands, you may now proceed to comment spam. In your comment, you will be embedding your video. However, the regular old embed code simply will not do. You need the AUTOPLAY embed code. Your typical YouTube embed code will look like this (forgive the screenshots, my code plugin thingy is being a jerk right now):

In order to make the video autoplay, you’ll want to add “autoplay=1″ to the end of both the URL’s in the code. The resulting code will now look like this:

And then you simply embed the crap out of it in MySpace comments. If you feel like being extra abusive, feel free to embed the video 2-3 times in a comment. Or even post multiple comments. Every time someone loads that MySpace page, you get a view (or more).

Okay, fine, to get you started I’ll give you one profile: McFly. Only because I don’t like them. If they stop allowing HTML in their comments in the near future, perhaps you’ll know why.

Have fun.