I have been reading with concern around the net of the possibility that Google is cracking down on eBay listings sites such as those produced with my plugin, WordBay, as well as BANS, phpBay etc.
The main reason is that I have seen my best performing site drop right out of the Google SERPS a couple of weeks ago, despite previously having good organic Google search traffic. It’s on an established domain, there is plenty of original content, it’s a .com, so I have a horrible suspicion it’s Google having a problem with eBay. Anybody else seen their eBay sites slapped? Or is this just some temporary glitch?
Posted on July 11th, 2008 by markowe
Filed under: Uncategorized
Maybe something to do with .info domains?
I heard that .info domains had taken a knock but no, the specific site I am talking about is a .com one, while my .info sites are still getting traffic. I fear the worst for them, too, though…
P.S. I forgot to mention that this is the second time this has happened to the same site, just dropped out for no reason. Some have speculated that the site I am talking about is, to quote, “s**t”. All I can say is that I have sites where I have put in far less work and have not got deindexed. I am also all in favour of Google cracking down on “thin affiliate sites”, I just don’t think my site is the worst example of these by a long way - at least I TRIED to get some original content in there!
Anyway, I have noticed a few others lately claiming that they have experienced something similar, so I am just wondering if this is a trend, or my sites are just… poo! (quite possible!)
google does this every so often. i would be surprised if sites didnt go back to normal. annoying, but it happens.
Sure, something is a bit suspicious about this though - it’s already happened once, and I had to do a major shake-up to get reindexed. Also, if you look around the net, seems quite a few people are complaining about the same thing. Well, I won’t whinge too much, but it’s kind of annoying when the goalposts get moved so I hope you are right and it’s just a blip.
back in the day, about a year and a half ago, before BANS really became super popular….this happened every other week. they hate thin affiliates so make sure you are not one.
i know for a fact my site is not a thin affiliate and has been around for almost 2 years now….so hopefully it will come back soon.
Thanks for sharing this.
I’m always late for everything. When I start to do it, they get banned… sigh… BIGH SIGH…
I do appreciate it if you could share the actual URL of that .com site so we don’t have to argue about the quality of their content and their performance.
Thanks again for the wonderful plugin.
Hi Mark,
This is a good plug, hope you earn from it!
A good mod for this would be to geo target on the fly based on IP address.
Only 50% of my traffic comes from my target country.
Using something like
http://www.hostip.info/dl/index.html (database)
http://www.hostip.info/use.html (API)
It should be possible to switch the GEO targetting on the fly… in my case allowing me to monetise maybe another %30 of my traffic.
Jez
sorry… forgot to subscribe to comments
Ok just tried this and got it working for a limited number of territories.
I was only able to test UK and US results as I do not have proxies for the other territories.
/* Get parameters for listing (see admin panel) */
$first_placementID = $WBOptions[’placement_id’];
$first_siteID = $WBOptions[’site_id’];
$first_location = $WBOptions[’location_id’];
$locals=array(array(’US’, ‘CA’, ‘UK’, ‘AU’, ‘IN’, ‘IE’), array(’0′, ‘2′, ‘3′, ‘15′, ‘203′, ‘205′), array(’711-53200-19255-0′, ‘706-53473-19255-0′, ‘710-53481-19255-0′, ‘705-53470-19255-0′, ‘4686-53472-19255-0′, ‘5282-53468-19255-0′), array(’1′, ‘2′, ‘3′, ‘15′, ‘95′, ‘99′));
$fp = fopen(’http://api.hostip.info/country.php?ip=’ . $_SERVER[’REMOTE_ADDR’], ‘r’);
while ($line = fread($fp, 1024)) {
$userCountry .= $line;
}
for ($i = 0; $i <= sizeof($locals[0]); $i++){
if ($userCountry == $locals[0][$i]){
$first_siteID = $locals[1][$i];
$first_placementID = $locals[2][$i];
$first_location = $locals[3][$i];
}
}
Hi Mark, This is Binh again.
My site is not in the Google SERP for it’s own name regardless of it’s PR4 status.
I doubt if it’s because it’s eBay affiliate site.
What do you think?
Hi,
Hmm, I wish I could tell you the magic answer, but I can’t read the Google mind…
It’s probably not that unusual to not rank for your own domain name - even though your domain name is quite old (5 years?) I suspect that most of the backlinks do not include the phrase “apmart”. And anyway, it doesn’t matter that much - you want to rank for your main “selling” keywords, right? Unless you are trying to create a strong brand with the name APMart
I have a site that does not rank for its name… it is a competitive keyed name.
Whether you rank for your name depends on:
> Your content
> Your links
Just like any other keyword. It is no easier to rank for your domain name than any other key… other than the fact that links containing your URL will be keyed… and people may be more inclined to use your domain name in a link.
Google your anchored backlinks with
“allinanchor:yourName”
and see where you rank compared to your actual rank for the keyword
You can use other operators like allintext: allintitle to have a bit more of a dig
These tools can only guide you as G discounts lots of links and other stuff.
Another good check regards penalites is to compare your rank in other search engines. If your rank is drastically different in those, then maybe evil G has given you a penalty.
The main thing though is to see where you rank for keywords you target in your content / backlinks. If you rank for those then you are probably good to go.
Why BANS get BANS
Some time ago I read a Google / Matt Cutts guideline put out for the benefit of their army manual reviewers on how to spot a spam site… I cannot find the original source of that info, but as I remember it went something like this:
“If, after you remove all images, advertising, links and duplicate content there is nothing left, then it is probably a spam site”.
Now apply that above methodology to as site like smsfans dot com
It is on a caught domain with a reasonable backlink profile, but IMO its not going to stick around…. not unless the owner gets tome content.
Now look at one “live BANS stores” taken from the BANS site itself:
http://www.rich-fragrant-coffee.com/
PR2, still in the index, I cannot comment on the standard or originality of the content, but the difference between the two sites is stark.
I would expect G will treat those two sites very differently.
Jez
Regards the original post… If G were stamping on Ebay sites purely on the basis of having Ebay links then HubPages and Squidoo Lenses would be zapped too.
I have a few Hubs / Lenses which were built for backlinks, but while I was there I added ebay modules…. those pages still hold SERPs for niche terms and have weathered the storm.
They also have a fair amount of original content.
Jez, you have an amazing output of content yourself
You are dead right about manual reviewing and the sites you mentioned. That coffee site has an extremely impressive amount of original content, which is in very favourable proportion to the affiliate links. It’s like you said in our private correspondence, it’s not just about keyword-stuffing a few ropey articles - even if that fools the search engines, it won’t fool the visitor or the potential back-linker or a manual reviewer. There’s just a certain something which distinguishes a quality site, and that can’t be got by quick methods…
“Jez, you have an amazing output of content yourself”
You can pick up an old copy of Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing for maybe $5 used on Amazon…. best investment you can possibly make if your running websites.
I dont think a manual review will be required with the SMS site… it uses the default BANS template and I could not find a single line of content on it….
That site was put up around a week ago on a pre owned domain… I think it was after 10/09/08 if you want to track it.
Oh yeah, my last mail has the image code you need
Hi Jez, I don’t think apmart is competitive at all. My site ranked first on MSN, Yahoo, and Live for “apmart” alone, while it’s not where on the first few hundred on Google. That’s too strange.
Regarding this: “If, after you remove all images, advertising, links and duplicate content there is nothing left, then it is probably a spam site”. Thank you very much!!! Now I know what to do to improve the WordBay even more to make it more like content.
But I thought links is very strong keyword stuffing thing. Am I wrong? A lot of search keywords come to my site also have those inside the links themselves.
This topic is very interesting.
Regards,
Binh
err!!! Sorry for an extra comment, but do you think displaying 50 items on one page is too much? Is displaying 20 items better?
I’ve got to say, I think 50 items is too much - it drastically increases the affiliate links-to-content ratio, and that can’t be popular with the Big G.
I even reduced the number of products shown to 6-8 on my blogs, feeling that 10 or more was too much. I guess some sort of pagination would solve that problem, but that is kind of getting complicated… Though I’ve got a little pagination routine somewhere in another project, maybe I can adapt it…
Thanks Mark,
What do you think about 50 items and removing the links from the item title. Shall this add up more “content”? That’s what I’ve been thinking after seeing Jez’s comment:
“If, after you remove all images, advertising, links and duplicate content there is nothing left, then it is probably a spam site”
Should I remove the link from image? Will that make less click through rate?
After remove all the links, I add another one “Buy now” or “Bid now” link instead. Shall that work?
Hi DS,
From what you say you definitely have a problem with G!
Keywords in links and page titles carry weight, but you also have to be aware of “over optimisation penalties”. Too many anchored links on page with too little content can get you a penalty.
Ebay ads are not original content. You need decent blog posts. You can use content generators, they work ok, but if a manual reviewer drops by your site you will get banned. You may also get banned from the aff networks. Adsense will definitely ban you, and Ebay probably would too…. if you get caught.
If you rank high in MSN and nowhere in G, then there is a very good chance you have a penalty….
You need to experiment and try different things. On one of your sites, try doing some 300+ word blog posts. Anchor the title and write natural text, not too spammy, perhaps 4% keyword density / repititoin and 10 ebay listings. See how that compares to your other sites… just keep trying different things on different sites….
Mark, I got a sad news here. My discount shopping site finally got deindexed by Google after 5 months staying in the index. I still don’t understand why that would have happened.
I build quite strong links to http://cars.apmart.com. After one month I expected it to get PR 3 or more, then 26 - 30 Oct it start getting hits from Google, which was a very good news. Suddenly, 31st of Oct Google didn’t send any traffic at all.
1st of Nov I realize Google still didn’t send any traffic. I checked “site:apmart.com” and see “no results”. I thought it’s temporary PR update but today is 6th Nov already, still not in the index. hichic…. what could be wrong?
I don’t think that’s because I’m having WordBay, but maybe I’m exploiting too much? What should I do? I really need some advice from you.
Regards,
Binh
Oh well, I just checked Jez’s comment from previous discussion and seem like I understand something.
Thanks Jez for the advice. Maybe it’s time I need to re-optimize my site for matching Jez’s suggestion.
I hope it’s not too late. Is it?
Very sad.
Hi Binh - sorry to hear about this. It’s really frustrating as there is nothing you can do about it. I can’t believe you would be TOTALLY deindexed though! Sandboxed is one thing, but this is really unusual. I see you are still deindexed - very strange, you should ask around some other forums, maybe people have some explanation.
We don’t even know for sure why Google does these things… One can only hope that it is just temporary. It might be possible to get reincluded too, at a later date. Maybe you should mail Google for reinclusion.
I always thought your site was quite interesting, that it wasn’t just a “thin” site, but I guess Google is getting really tough on eBay listings sites. And you do have quite a lot of ads on your pages. Still, that’s no reason either… Hopefully it is worth continuing to work on your site. However, even if you do return to the SERPS you will probably continue to get traffic, but it will be much much less, a volume that Google “thinks” is realistic, and it may be impossible to return to the “glory” days of dozens of hits every day…
Sorry to hear it, anyway…
Why these sites are getting dropped is a mystery to me… do a phrase search on
“powered by build a niche store”
and you will see loads of sites still indexed… some have content on them, but lots are just out of the box bans with nothing but listings… why some of these stick around and not others is beyond me.
I think it maybe human moderators dumping them.
Jez
I recently found out the latest post from http://cars.apmart.com link to very bad quality external pages, so I removed those. I hope if that’s the cause then my site maybe back soon.
Unfortunately sometimes, I’m very scared to email the big G, because I’m not sure exactly what problem caused my site the be banned.
If frankly speaking, I’m not sure my site meet the quality guidelines. But the fact is that many sites lower quality than mine still stay in the index.
Do you think someone might have reported my site as spam site? Such as a competitor?
Binh
Mark, I forgot… Thanks for your concern. I tried my best to make my site not thin affiliate site. But who knows, maybe I didn’t build enough unique content before I build links.
Jez, yes you are right. What I expected is that if my site still not meeting the quality standard, then it should be lowered in the SERP, but totally gone, is something really harsh on me.
Honestly, Yahoo and other search engines are sending enough traffic for me to make a living, so not too much financial loss so far. The real issue is, I experienced Google traffic for 6 days, then the 7 days my site got indexed. During this 6 days I noticed 2 times more traffic, but the CTR and conversion rate only about 10% increased, not that much of difference.
Thanks again and I wish WordBay will grow into a big community just like BANS is…
Regards,
Binh