This goal of this post is to try and help shed light on the reasons why some people who use the phpBay plugin with their Wordpress blog have had their rankings and traffic disappear. These tips are also a good read for anyone who is still seeing success with their phpBay affiliate sites, but would like to ensure the longevity of this income and want to do the right thing for their website’s fate in the future.

Should you use the SEO URLs option?

First point is about the “SEO URLs” option that is so prominently advertised as a huge benefit to using this product. There are many misconceptions about what this will do to your site in the search engine results pages (SERPs). Many people believe that this feature is the sole reason they are successful in attracting natural (organic) traffic to their site. However, this couldn’t be farther from the truth… read on.

If the URLs created by phpBay are not indexed by the search engines, it does not matter what they look like. A “SEO URL” (aka a URL with keywords in it) that actual exists on your website (i.e. www.yourdomain.com/my-great-article-title.html) is definitely beneficial to your natural rankings… however, an affiliate link, which these eBay links are that are created by this plugin, is NOT indexed on your domain… meaning Google doesn’t index and cache your “SEO” affiliate URLs, they are basically ignored. I know, this is tough to swallow, I get it. I’ve already been in numerous arguments over this, but that is only because the people I’ve talked to about it so far have been very inexperienced search engine marketers. Internet marketing is extremely complex and it takes some time and a vast amount of experience before you can really be confident (and correct) in what you tell other people.

Any “long tail search traffic” you pick up from organic SERP listings is from the actual auction title that appears on your site as a result of the plugin, not from whatever keywords are in the URL. The clickable text is what is read by the search engines, the TEXT, NOT the URL.

This is just the truth there really is no debating that.

If anything, having “SEO” affiliate URLs might make the search engines say “Hmm, what is this person trying to do here… optimize their affiliate links? that’s fishy”.

To confirm what I am saying, go to your site (if you currently use the phpBay Wordpress plugin) and copy one of your “SEO URL” affiliate links to your clipboard… then go to Google.com and search for:

cache: [your "SEO URL" eBay affiliate link here]

You will notice that nothing appears, because your affiliate links do not get indexed by the search engines (mainly Google - nobody should care what MSN or Yahoo does, they’re lame), so having keywords in your affiliate URLs does not benefit your site in any way.

My recommendation is to leave the default setting for the URLs, which makes them show up on your blog as links that look like this: http://rover.ebay.com/blah-blah-blah. As long as you make sure that the out-bound eBay links have the “nofollow” attribute assigned to them you are fine, and in fact you are in a better position doing that than enabling the “SEO URLs”.

Anyone who really knows how SEO and search engines work will know what I’m talking about without thinking I’m crazy. Whoever thinks I’m nuts just doesn’t have enough experience doing this stuff, no offense to anyone I’m only trying to help people make more money and have higher rankings for longer periods of time. Shouldn’t everyone be entitled to a stable income from their affiliate websites? I think so, but it takes patience and lots of trial and error. Just make sure you do a whole bunch of research before making any big changes to your site, because if you get the right advice beforehand you can avoid making some very common (and traffic-threatening) mistakes. As we all know, the only way to make money online from a blog is to have a steady visitor stream. If you’re visitors mainly come to your site from natural search listings you have a greater chance of making money from them than you do with a purely “social” audience.

For everyone who is doubting everything I said above and saying to themselves “Well I have my site setup with 40 eBay links per page and no written content and I’m doing fine” - I wish you the best. If you want your rankings to stay the same, and even increase in the years to come, you wouldn’t do that. It is risky behavior that will inevitably end is disaster.

You may be fine now but as many people have seen, nothing lasts forever and eventually the big G-dog will make their way around to your affiliate-link-laden website and probably reduce your rankings, or even worse completely de-index your pages.

The point I’m trying to drive home is to make sure you have LOTS OF QUALITY CONTENT on your site if you plan to make money from it with affiliate links. This will ensure that your website continues to build authority in the months and years to come and will never raise any red flags with the search engines, causing them scrutinize what you are doing.

Don’t make your sites all about affiliate links with a little content thrown in, there is no longevity in that and you will most likely be disappointed in the future when you get slammed. If you don’t get slammed and you never lose your rankings you are extremely lucky and should play the lottery (and cut me in 10%).

Modifying the default html template

There are also some modifications that I make to the default html template that the phpBay plugin uses for the eBay links (template.ebay.results.html).

It is just a little messy and there is a little too much code, and the fact that the images that it generates are clickable also means that for every eBay product that appears on your site you have TWO affiliate links pointing out of your site instead of one. If you want both the image and the auction title to be click-able code in a way where you only have one outbound affiliate link per product.

The other thing you want to do is remove the ALT text from the image that is generated. The search engines will already read the auction title from the click-able text link that appears, they do not need to see the exact same title again in your image alt tag.

If you have any questions about how to go about making these modifications leave me a comment and I’ll gladly email you my template that is already fixed up. All you’ll need to do is access your web server via FTP and swap out the template files.

Be smart, think ahead

The point is to minimize the amount of affiliate links you have on your site. Search engines do not thoroughly enjoy sites with hundreds (or even dozens) of affiliate links, and they are not stupid. Unless you have an extremely authoritative site on a particular topic this would be considered very risky behavior. The average Joe will probably get away with it for a while but eventually he’ll get hit if he has tons of affiliate links on his site and little legitimate content.

Again, I’m only trying to help those that are suffering, and maybe give some helpful ideas to those that think they’ll be king of the internet marketing world forever.Hopefully these tips have helped and if you have any questions or comments please feel free to send them my way.