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.

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.

If you’re not already familiar with phpbay, I’ll give you a moment to slap yourself.

Go on. Right in the face.

Phpbay is an incredibly useful WordPress plugin (API is also available) that allows you to display relevant ebay listings on your websites to earn a commission. In order to use it, you’ll need to be signed up with the Ebay Partner Network. Some people have reported difficulty getting approved by EPN, but there are alternatives available. You can also join the Ebay affiliate program through the Pepperjam Network.

There’s a reason you’ve heard about Phpbay so much around various internet marketing portals: it’s awesome. But instead of just praising it like a lunatic in hopes that you will purchase it through one of my sneakily masked affiliate links, I will instead give you some other useful info that I myself use that will make your phpbay stores even more awesomer.

Ebay Search Results
Depending on the nature of your site, a lot of times users will land on your site and not realize that you’re simply serving them eBay results. As far as I’m concerned, this is a good thing. However, they may try to search for items that you don’t have listings for on your site. If you just have a regular old wordpress sidebar search bar, it’s not going to find what they are looking for unless you’ve included matching content on your site. Wouldn’t it be nice to display ebay results on your site that match their query?

All you have to do is go into search.php and replace some code. Starting with the line:

Delete everything up to:

(including that string) Replace with the following code:

Ta-da. That piece of code is brought to you by Wade himself, creator of PhpBay Pro.

In some cases, your particular theme may not have a search.php, but rather a searchform.php. I have not yet devised a way to make this work with this sort of rogue theme, but as soon as I figure it out, you’ll be the first to know.

Make the Entire Listing Clickable
By default, only the text of your phpbay listings are clickable. Poo on that. Why not make the whole thing clickable? Depending on whether or not you are displaying results in rows or columns, you will need to make the following adjustment to the respective file.

If you’re using row results, you’ll want to edit the file called template.ebay.results, which is located in the “templates” folder inside the phpbay plugin folder. The original file looks like this:

The new, edited file should look like this:

Now, for those of you using column results, you’ll want to be editing template.column.results, located in the same place as the other template file. The original file will look like this:

Go ahead and replace all that with the following code:

There you have it. Now your auction results are completely clickable. Mo’ clicks = mo’ money. But beware, mo’ money = mo’ problems.

Removing Icons
On some sites, I like to go the extra mile to minimize the ebayness of the results displayed. To do this, I simply remove those pesky icons that are so reminiscent of ebay. I almost always get rid of the “But it Now” icons, and I sometimes get rid of the paypal logo. To do so is really simple. You’ll need to edit the same files talked about above, except all you’ll need to do is delete the line of code that calls that particular icon.

In template.ebay.results, you’ll see a string of text that says:

Deleting that line entirely will remove the paypal logo from your listings and not adversely affect anything else. Similarly, deleting:

will effectively remove the bid/buy it now logo.

In template.column.results, you’d simply need to delete

to remove the paypal logo, and so on and so forth.

In a future post I’ll go into detail about how to construct your Phpbay sites in such a way to minimize your bounce rate and maximize your CTR. But for now, it is time to open another bottle of Martinelli’s award winning apple cider.