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!

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.

EDIT:
At the request of the powers that be, I unfortunately must remove the info that was formerly contained in this post.

If you want to talk CL business, you can try to catch me on AIM at: offwhitehat.

Edit:

Dang, two posts deleted?

Sorry guys. I had no choice but to remove this post as well as one other dealing with a similar subject matter. I’ll try to make up for it with quality future posts.

If you have any questions look for me on AIM at: offwhitehat.