Okay, the title is a little dramatic. This new change at EPN hasn’t as adversely affected everyone else as it has me (as far as I know). But it did make my daily clicks drop by like 200%. I will now tell you why, on the off chance you have the same problem.

A while ago, I made a post containing some tips and tricks to customize PhpBay, which is a fantastic wordpress plugin used to display eBay results that you should already have. In that post, I mentioned editing templates.ebay.results.html to make your entire listing results clickable (not just the title or title/image, but the whole shabang). I am making this post on the outside chance that either you made/found a similar code, or by the grace of God you got the code from this very site, making me personally responsible for your misfortune.

I can’t even remember where I got that code. I think I may have stole it from Radio, creator of Auction2Post. If it wasn’t him, I have a feeling whoever it was is going to remind me soon! Anyway, it worked great for a long time.

Then one day I get an email from Wade over at PhpBay telling me that Ebay has decided they don’t want affiliates using 302 redirects on their sites anymore. PhpBay was using 302 redirects by default. Why did Ebay make this seemingly trivial request? Well, apparently some affiliates were having their 302 redirect links indexed with Ebay’s content on search engines. In other words, a user executes a search query on Google, sees a result they like with a URL that points to your site, but when they click it, they are just forwarding (through an aff link) to that result on Ebay. Ebay didn’t like this. And unless you own Google, you are basically dropping rover links on a 3rd party site, and that is a no-no.

Okay, so Ebay wants 301 redirects. This will tell the search engines that the content found on the other side of that affiliate link belongs to Ebay. Fine with me. Being the upstanding and incredibly quick working man that he is, Wade over at PhpBay quickly investigated what changes needed to be made to the plugin in order to adhere to these new terms.

It ended up being a very small change to one file, the file known as auction.php that sits in whatever directory you happened to install WordPress. I opened a beer and began updating every single one of my sites. I then played TF2 and fell asleep peacefully around 7am.

OMG Where Are My Clickz!?
The next few days my EPN dashboard graph thingy looked like the world’s tallest and simplest roller coaster. Needless to say, I was alarmed. I quickly began creating EPN conspiracy theories in my mind (and on message boards).

I feel like this story is getting long-winded and dramatic so I’m just gonna cut to the chase:

IE will NOT pass the referring URL to a new window with Javascript!

Freaking Internet Explorer. And as we all know, the masses still use the browser that was conveniently pre-loaded for them on their PC. If you navigated to my old post which contains the modified template.ebay.results.html code, you will see something like:

added in there. This was the culprit. Only non-IE visitors were managing to click from my site to eBay. People using IE would click a result, then be taken to a blank page on my site where they would scratch their heads and then immediately forget my site ever existed.

Solution
Since I’m just a retard that steals other people’s code and can barely make a blog post, I had no idea what the hell to do. Luckily, my coding wizard friend Ryan looked into it for me and found an extremely simple solution to fix this.

Follow these super duper easy steps:

1. Open up the new Auction.php file in your favorite text editor (Notepad2 is a good one)
2. Scroll down to line 35, and find the string: $referer_approved = false;
3. Simply change “false” to “true” (without the quotes, duh!)

And like magic, the javascript links will work again.

Will eBay Care?
How in the heck should I know? If anyone at the eBay Partner Network is reading this, please feel free to respond. Also, did I ever tell you how beautiful you are?

Hey Wait a Second, Why do you Need that Javascript Crappola Anyway?
Well, that’s a valid question. I guess I don’t, really. But I really like making the entire listing clickable. I also like the fact that when a user hovers over the link it doesn’t show the URL at the bottom of their browser. I’m not ready to part with those two things, as I feel they improve the performance of the majority of my sites. I am also fantastically stubborn and didn’t want to revert to “default”.

My birthday is tomorrow, so I’m gonna start drinking now. Bye!

Don’t act like you don’t want to know what I’ve been up to. I know you do.

Friday (weekend starts on Friday, rite??) I took a little trip up the 405 fwy to Santa Monica to have lunch with Nicole and Leah from W4. In case you didn’t know, W4 is a newer affiliate network comprised of a bunch of awesome folks, many of which came from Hydra. Truth be told, I never cared much for Hydra. Actually I found them to be downright rude, at times. But it seems like the good people at Hydra went elsewhere (such as W4) and the evil ones stayed behind. That’s the only conclusion I can draw.

I had the tri-tip sandwich and some Belgian beer called Allagash. It was pretty delicious. We spoke of all things Internet. Afterward, I got a chance to meet with W4 co-founder, Jason Durant. He then gave me a large briefcase full of cash and instructed me to create this blog post. Okay not really but I did get some pens and even some sweet W4 sunglasses. I meant to take more pictures but somehow this was all I got:

Anyhoo, they’re really good people and you should probably do business with them. Here is my affiliate link again in case you missed it.

Later that night I went to a friend’s house in Long Beach and don’t remember much of what happened there.

Saturday, I got my Scrapebox on. If you haven’t heard of this phenomenal tool, thank your lucky stars you read my blog. Some folks don’t like the fact that people like me are blabbing about this tool because of the fact that it is very awesome and could easily become much less effective if too many newbs started abusing the hell out of it. It’s basically a comment spamming utility…but it is so much more. I’m not going to get into the specifics of it. Just trust me, it rocks. If you have no idea what you’re doing, I don’t recommend you use it because you could very well end up harming your sites by using it incorrectly. But for the more seasoned SEO, this tool is a Godsend.

Saturday night I went and saw my old guitar teacher play at some seedy bar downtown. Loved it.

Sunday was a bit of a lazy day. Some of it was spent at the coffee house, some was spent with good company skipping rocks and smoking weed admiring the Pacific Ocean. Here is a camera phone pic I took:

Then I came home and started making a blogpost to schedule for this morning, pretending as if I actually wrote it now and not Sunday afternoon. Unfortunately, I cannot tell you what I did last night, because I do not know. Not yet, anyway. Does that make sense?

Speaking of Monday…Monday gets a bad rap. 9-5ers can’t really fully appreciate Mondays. Trust me, they can be pretty sweet. I could go on and on about what I like about Mondays, but a little punk band by the name of NOFX already did that for me. Indulge me, if you will, and check out the following song entitled, “Thank God it’s Monday”.

Happy Monday!