I came across a thread on Wickedfire recently where someone was asking about how to go about getting lots of images for a site without much of a budget. Of course you could just steal them, but then you risk the content owner finding out about it and hassling you. Another problem is that Google will see them as duplicate image content and won’t rank your images in their image search. Here is a simple workaround I’ve used plenty of times in the past.

TinEye – Reverse Image Search is a site you may be familiar with. It’s basically a site with a huge index of images that you can use to cross reference any particular image and find out if it exists anywhere else on the internet. Many stock photo owners and webmasters use it to see if and where their images are being used. However, most of us just use it to find additional pictures of those special hot chicks that captivate us on forums, 4chan, etc. Of course, it hasn’t come close to indexing the whole web, but as far as I know it has the largest index of image-searchable images around and it’s super easy to use. I don’t know how exactly their image detection algorithm works, but I know how it doesn’t work, and I’m pretty confident that Google uses something similar to identify duplicate images.

Let’s use this silly cat picture as an example:

If you look this image up on TinEye (url: http://offwhitehat.com/images/catteeth-original.jpg), there are a whole bunch of results, as it has been published all over the internet. In my initial testing, I tried converting images to black & white to see if that would make them appear unique, but as you can tell by running a search on this image: http://offwhitehat.com/images/catteeth_bw.jpg, it is too smart for that.

My next experiment was mirroring the image, and voila, it works. Check out this horizontally flipped version of the image: http://offwhitehat.com/images/catteeth-reverse.jpg. Do a search and this here website should be the only one in the index for that particular image. All I did was flip it in Photoshop. If you are a Photoshop noob, you just go to Image > Image Rotation > Flip Canvas Horizontally. I’m sure most photo programs have the same capability. Some are probably even easier than others. However, Photoshop has a sweet batch function that you can use to automate the flipping of your images.

Of course, for images with text and special circumstances like that, this technique may not be the greatest. But yawning cat pictures? The best!

Anyway, now you have a way to steal lots of images, make them look like unique image content, and make it super hard for the people you are robbing to find out. Neat!

PS This is probably illegal and I totally don’t think you should do it. This is all hypothetical.

Edit: I forgot to add that this method won’t work on images that are nearly symmetrical. There needs to be a significant degree of variation to the flipped version, like with the cat example above.

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!

This is pretty much as white hat as it gets. Or at least as white hat as I get, in any case. It is also incredibly effective. I’ve been implementing this technique for a few weeks now and the results have been phenomenal.

You can’t beat relevant, authority links. You just can’t. Especially if they’re do-follow/one-way links. Of course, reciprocal ones aren’t so bad either. So, what’s the best way to get them? Well, you could of course simply email the webmasters of sites that you’d like to have a link on and ask. In some cases, this will work. It usually helps to be polite, throw in some flattery about their site, and maybe offer a link back in exchange. But, depending on the niche, you’re going to have varying degrees of success. Despite your advanced charm, some emails will still be dismissed. I’m going to teach you a simple method to drastically improve the success of good old fashion link-panhandling.

What You Need
Aside from a computer, the Internet, and your incredible powers of persuasion, you will need to install this Firefox plugin.

What You Do
Step A: Find a juicy site or blog in your niche with high PR and tons of inbound links. Ideally something ranking for a keyword you’re trying to dominate (or maintain). Do they have a links page? Perhaps a blogroll? If yes, proceed to step B.

Step B: Navigate that mouse of yours to your Tools menu in Firefox and select “Check Page Links”. This will activate that new plugin you installed. You will see the progress at the bottom. If there are lots of links on the page, it may take a couple minutes. Go roll a cigarette or perhaps get briefly involved in political debate on Wickedfire. When you come back, you will notice all the links on the page have been highlighted. Proceed to step C.

Step C: Look for red and yellow highlighted links. These links are the problematic ones. Most webmasters don’t have time to check their blogroll often and are usually linking to a few dead sites. Every now and then the plugin will mistakenly mark a working site as a problem site, so in the name of being thorough, we’re going to manually check these. Open up a notepad document so you can catalog the URLs that are broken. Make a list. Proceed to Step D.

Step D: Find the email contact for the site. Create a new email. Proceed to Step E.

Step E: Now it’s time to sweet talk the pants off these bitches. Let them know that you are so-and-so from yourspammyasssite.com. Tell them you were browsing their links and happened to notice the following links are bad: badlink1.com, badlink2.com, badlink3.com, etc. Casually mention that Google tends to frown upon dead or broken links, and it can often hurt your search engine rankings when you are linking to resources that don’t exist. After all of this, mention that if they feel that your site is relevant, you would appreciate it if they would consider linking to you.

I Dunno Dude, This Sounds Like Too Much Work
How dare you. First of all, Rome wasn’t built out of hay, okay? When you shoot out a handful of these emails, you’ll see how well it works. Every single person that has responded thus far has agreed to give me a link. One-way links. One site even gave me a paid spot for free, out of gratitude (for six months). Of course, not everyone has responded. In all likelihood, some emails are probably never even read. That’s just the nature of the game. But it is still very effective and very much worth it.

And if that doesn’t convince you, I’ll have you know that within the past couple weeks I have moved onto the first page (not quite #1, but getting there) for a keyword I had been targeting for a long time. A highly competitive keyword that gets 90,500 searches/mo, according to Google (yes, exact match). I attribute this sudden success to the links I’ve acquired in this short period of time.

You want that SEO money? Hmmm? Do you!? Wanna sit around all day playing video games and drinking Mtn Dew while your sites keep making you money? Well you gotta do the leg work first. Stop reading my whack ass blog and go try this. You may send me gift baskets later if you’d like.

A Dark Twist
Sorry. Thought I was done blabbing. Not the case. It just occurred to me that you might be able to dirty up this method. I don’t really like advocating squeaky clean white-hat SEO methods because they make me feel like a square. So I’m just going to throw this out there.

Let’s say you have a site outranking you for a particular keyword. One of the first things I do in this situation is figure out who is linking to them. You can do this easily by using Yahoo! Site Explorer. Now, for the sake of this example, let’s say you determine that ABCsite.com is linking to your competitor, XYZsite.com, in their blogroll. This would work best with a site with a lot of links. You would use the method detailed above, everything the same way. Find the broken links on ABCsite.com, and contact the webmaster with a humble request to have your site included. Only difference is, in this case you would casually interject your competitor site, XYZsite.com, into your list of broken sites, after listing 3 or four legitimately broken/dead sites.

The idea is to trick the webmaster at ABCsite.com to not only add a link to your site, but remove the link to your competitor’s site, after you’ve convinced them that it’s a dead link. Perhaps after the webmaster sees that the first two or three links in your list are in fact dead, they will assume the rest of your list is accurate. How devious. What’s the worst that could happen? If the webmaster notices the link is in fact still good, he/she will most likely just assume it was a temporary outage or a simple error.

There. Now I feel off-white again.

First of all, if you haven’t already, you need to read this post, which was the inspiration and the foundation for this method I still currently use to build links. And I’m not the only one doing it.

Trouble was, after I read that article, I was left feeling sort of confused still. How do I take a womens shoes site (or something like that!) and turn it into a piece of useful software? Well, one answer is in the title of this post, now isn’t it!?

Screensavers are usually in either one of two formats: .exe or .src. If you don’t already have the software to compile screensavers, you might want to “buy” some. I’m currently using a program called “Screensaver Factory 5 Enterprise”. If you already have some images, you can literally build and compile a simple slideshow screensaver in about 30 seconds. In the womens shoe site scenario, I would probably put together a nice little slideshow featuring the most sought after womens shoes. By default, the program adds little fancy transitions and what not. Not that they really matter too much. If you really want to get maximum benefit, you might want to watermark your images with your URL (yes, people actually download these things).

Distribution
Now, you’ve got your screensaver. It is time to distribute it. Just about every software download site has a submission area. At this point, if you’ve never authored/distributed software before, you might be thinking about outsourcing this part. Well, that’s not entirely necessary, thanks to a little something called a PAD file.

What the Shit is a PAD File?
I’m glad you asked! PAD stands for “portable application description”. Basically, a PAD file is an xml file that exists on your server (or wherever) that contains all the necessary information about your software such as size, version, links to download and more. The idea is that instead of having to manually make updates all the time when things change with software (like updates), you simply update one PAD file and the sites offering the software usually poll their PAD files regularly for changes. Now, the beauty of using the PAD file is that most of these software sites that accept submissions will ONLY ask for a link to your PAD file because it already contains all the information they need. This means your time spent on each site is quite minimal.

I Can Haz PAD File?
Yes, you can. I use a simple utility called PadGen that you can download here to create my PAD files. Keep in mind that not all fields are necessary so don’t spend all afternoon on it. Just get the important ones covered. Some sites do have requirements about what information needs to be contained in a PAD file before it is accepted for inclusion or review.

Hopefully I don’t need to tell you that you need to include your URL to the site/page you’re promoting in your PAD file.

How ‘Bout Some Sites?
Of course. I live to please you. I’m going to give you some master list of software sites that will accept your useless ladies shoe screensavers, but I will give you a few. They really aren’t hard to find, and there are tons of them. And of course many of them just scrape data from the other ones so there are plenty of links to be had, here. There are also distribution services in the business of charging you for distributing your software, but I don’t think they’re necessary for this sort of task. Now, about them sites…

1. Softpedia.com
2. Windows7Download.com
3. FreeDownloadManager.org
4. DailySofts.com
5. PCWin.com
6. FileBoost.net
7. FreeWareTown.com
8. Files54.com
9. A ton more…get your Google on

Alrighty. Have fun. Please don’t take my method (which is obviously just an interpretation of Eli’s Method) and run it into the ground. Thank you.

Whether you’ve got a real-live e-commerce site packed with products that you sell or you just have a bunch of shady affiliate sites selling other people’s crap, read on for info on a little known place to get a bit of extra traffic.

I’m not going to put the name of the site in the body of this post because I fear they will discover my ramblings and then perhaps get a little stricter on the site approval process. In any event, the site + submission page in question can be found here (yes I have it redirecting twice including a double-meta refresh because I’m that excessively paranoid and ridiculous).

It clearly states that they don’t accept affiliate sites…but guess what? Every affiliate site I have submitted has been accepted. Every site gets a trickle of traffic from that site daily from shop-happy visitors. If you know anything about me, you know the vast majority of my shopping sites are built with phpbay. The only sites I’ve submitted have been phpbay stores (and they’ve all been approved).

Once your site is approved, your listings are automatically scraped from your site and included in the index of the shopping site in question (that which we do not speak of). Phpbay listings seem to work fantastically.

If you don’t already own a copy of phpbay, buy it here through my link because you love me.

You do love me, don’t you? Or was that all just sweet talk?

That’s right, I’m about to post something useful. Hold on to your off-white hat.

In our never ending quest to build links, posting comments on relevant (or even irrelevant) blogs with a link to your site is still a powerful tool. However, how many times have you stumbled upon a great post that is just BEGGING for your comment, only to discover that comments are strictly moderated? Or worse, they’re moderated AND the blog hasn’t been updated in forever, indicating that it may have been abandoned by the owner altogether?

Don’t give up. There is still hope.

When someone goes to leave a comment on a WordPress blog, they are presented with four fields:

• -Name (Required)
• -E-mail (Required, not visible to anyone other than site admin)
• -URL (Optional)
• -(Comment)

If the site owner has elected to hold comments in moderation (many do), your comment will not appear immediately after submitting it. It will be held in the moderation queue. Unless, of course, you have had a previously approved comment and you use the same email that you used the first time. Raise your hand if you see where I’m going with this.

The Strategy

…Is simple. Check out the existing comments on the article. Find one with a hyperlinked name. Follow that link to that person’s site, and look for a contact email. Once you’ve found it, return to the article and use the same info to leave another comment. You are now impersonating someone with a previously approved comment. The comment field should allow you to use html. Go ahead and leave your link with whatever dang anchor text you want in there.

As you might have guessed, this will not work 100% of the time. The main reason being you have no way of knowing what email was actually used to leave the comment. However, in all likelihood, the person that left that previously approved comment used the same email that they display on their website. This method also of course depends on the fact that the site owner has a publicly displayed email address.

And now the FAQ…

What if I Can’t Find Their Email?

Move on. Find another comment leaver. Depending on how much you want that link, you may or may not want to spend 20 minutes trying to find one that works.

Is This Unethical?

Sort of, but  it’s not that bad. Actually I think it perfectly reflects the theme and intent of this site.

Will it Work with Other CMS’s besides WordPress?

Do I look like an internet scientist to you?

Will this Post Upset the Natural Balance of the WordPress Universe and Destroy the Internet?

Yes.

Will this Shady Shit Work Even on This Site?

Probably, dick!

EDIT (2/22/10): Instead of reading all that crap below, why not just watch this handy dandy video about creating white label sites with Dating Gold?:

Okay so I’ll try to make this brief. This is basically a very simple (and cheap) way to get a white label dating site up and running and earning you a few bucks on the side. I’ve got a couple set up that bring in about $50-$60 a month each that I’ve been meaning to promote off-line…just haven’t got around to it. Another $60 a month won’t make you rich, but it might cover your phone bill, you ungrateful bastard. And of course it’s very scalable. Check it out…

If you are unfamiliar with how white labels work, basically you set up a site that instead of directing to affiliate offers actually facilitates the sale of a product or service. It can help increase conversions dramatically since you aren’t bouncing your visitors all over the dang internet.

Dating Gold makes this process painless. If you’re not familiar with their network, they are the ones behind Amateur Match. Using their white label system, all you have to do is register a domain, point the nameservers to the ones Dating Gold provides you with, enter Title/Description/Keyword info, upload a logo, and boom, the site is live.

Once you’ve got it up and running, you will be paid based on a 50% rev share system. Every time someone new signs up, you get 50% (currently about $15). Even better, you get 50% for the lifetime of that new member. So each month that person renews their membership, you get another $15. Of course, some cancel in the first month, but then some stick around for a year or more.

Currently, there are two types of white labels available. The first is the standard geo-targeted local dating site, and the second is a cam site. There are a few theme options available and you can also customize the color scheme. Here is an example of one:

Getting Traffic
Originally, my plan with my sites were to do a bunch of off-line promotion and see how it does. The domains I used are somewhat “local” themselves. However, after being up for just a few months, they started getting traffic. The downside is, there is currently no way to track traffic stats. I can only assume the traffic is from organic search since I haven’t promoted the site anywhere and only dropped a handful of links to them. For whatever reason, some search engines seem to like these geo-targeted white label sites.

Obviously, the title and keywords you use will have a great impact on whether or not your white label sites pull any organic traffic. I’m not going to divulge what keywords I used, but they were somewhat broad dating terms that have a reasonable (but not super high) amount of competition.

Off-Line Promotion
Considering I haven’t even conducted this test yet, I can’t really encourage you to try it, but it’s something I’m definitely planning on getting around to. Flyer drops at sex shops/strip clubs, ads in the back of shady magazines, etc. Hopefully I’ll actually get to this in Jan/Feb when dating is hot and have some interesting data to share with all of you.

Goddammit, I was supposed to keep this brief!!!

If you don’t use Phpbay or Auction 2 Post, you probably aren’t very interested in this post. Why are you still reading? What the heck is the matter with you?

To be perfectly honest, I’m a little bit buzzed right now, but I will try to stay on topic.

If you’re not already familiar, Auction 2 Post is a very handy WordPress plugin that feeds ebay auctions into your wordpress blogs as posts to provide you with all sorts of fresh content. However, once those auctions end, you don’t really want a bunch of posts linking to dead auctions. Ebay doesn’t want you doing that, either. Luckily, A2P has the ability to automatically delete posts for you once those items expire.

But what about the pages on your site that are indexed by Google and other search engines that get automatically deleted by A2P? Unless you do something about it, those precious visitors trying to access those pages will arrive on your site’s default 404 page. How you handle these 404 visitors is up to you. One plugin you might want to check out to handle your 404′s is called Smart 404. That’s one idea. But in my opinion, this is a better one…

If you’re a member of EPN and you are using Auction 2 Post, chances are you also own PhpBay. If not, well, you should probably take care of that. Click here to buy it so I can get my $19 or whatever and we can move on.

The Method
First of all, I just want to say that I suck complete ass at php and pretty much anything that takes any real coding know-how. Fortunately, Joshua Ziering aka Enigmabomb was kind enough to help me put this code together (based on some code I stole and his own magic) to get this thing to work. Please buy (or give) him a lap dance at ASW to show your appreciation.

The idea of this trick is to take the keyword your visitor used to find your site to begin with and show relevant ebay auctions based on their search query in the place of a useless 404 page. It will work with Google, Bing, Yahoo, and any search engine that uses “q=” to pass the variable.

You’re going to need to edit your theme’s 404.php file to do this. Since it is apparently impossible for a mortal man to get certain code to display properly as code in this post with the theme I am using on this blog, I am going to have to give you text files.

Here is your basic WordPress 404.php file (will likely be slightly different depending on your theme)

And here is the 404.php I use with all the magic code added to it. Obviously it will not work if you don’t have PhpBay installed on your site.

Of course you might want to tweak that a little bit in order to suit your theme, every case is different. But that should at least get you headed in the right direction.

Booyah. Big ups to Enigmabomb. Peace.

Well, finally some good news from the Ebay Partner Network. I don’t want to even talk about the upcoming shift to “Quality Click Pricing” because it’s just going to upset me. Perhaps I’ll have a future post all about optimizing your phpBay sites for the new system, but first I’m going to have to figure that out for myself!

In any event, EPN recently introduced four new programs: Ireland, Austria, Switzerland, and Germany.

Why is Germany in bold!? Well, because Germany is Ebay’s second largest market after of course the United States. This means that all sorts of untapped niches and microniches can potentially be exploited over in good old Deutschland.

Pic (sorta) related:

It also opens up some domaining opportunities if you’re thinking about registering .de domains. Although there is definitely competition in the .de domaining game, it’s nowhere near that of the .com industry. However, keep in mind that .de is the second most popular TLD in the world with an estimated six million .de domains already registered.

If you’re interested in searching for a good .de domain in any particular niche, here is what I recommend you do:

1. Determine the main keyword related to your niche
2. Use Google Language Tools to translate that word into German
3. Use Google Adwords Keyword Tool to check out how many searches that keyword and related keywords are pulling in [use exact match]
4. Snag a .de domain

Unfortunately, my most favorite registrar, Namecheap, does not offer .de registration at this time. Here are some alternatives (prices/currency conversions obviously reflect the time of this writing, don’t expect me to update this shit all the time!):

1. GoDaddy* – $17.99/yr (PayPal accepted)
2. iWantMyName.com* – $29.00/yr
3. EuroDNS* - apprx. $26.23/year (€16/yr plus €2 setup fee)
4. iDotz**- $19.95/yr
5. DomainDiscount24.com – $10.39 (€7.14)/yr
6. Joker.com – $9.16/yr
7. Europe Registry – $13.11 (€9)/yr

But I Heard You Have to Live in Germany to Register a .DE domain!?

Not the case, not the case. That myth is derived from the fact that the administrative contact on each .de domain registered must be located in Germany. Some registrars offer to act as the administrative contact on your behalf, thus circumventing this little bump in the road. However, some registrars will charge an additional fee for this (and some may not offer this service at all).

The registrars with the * listed above are the ones that include an administrative contact in Germany with your registration.

**Idotz.net will provide a German administrative contact for an additional fee.

The others either don’t offer this service or charge an additional fee (you’ll have to do your own research you bastard). Or you could just use your long lost cousin that lives in Germany as your administrative contact.

Only one I’ve used myself is GoDaddy (I know, I know). They might not be my favorite registrar but when it comes to international domains, I’d rather deal with their spammy site/terrible support and hopefully not have any further problems. Coincidentally, they’re also the only registrar listed above that I have an active affiliate relationship with. Weird.

EDIT: I forgot to mention that if you plan on building and optimizing sites for German traffic, it’s imperative that you have the site(s) HOSTED over there. Having your international sites hosted on IPs in the countries they are targeting helps a ton for ranking on search engines specific to that country. As far as which host to use, do your dang homework. As of now I use a UK host called Nativespace for all my European e-pillaging. That’s pretty close to Germany, right!?

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.