Using PHPBay is a great way to quickly create an eBay affiliate site. Unfortunately, that ease also means anyone can create a ton of ‘eBay’ sites and pages which, as you might suspect, Google frowns upon. Anything mass produced – you might as well assume Google will not like that.
For that reason ‘just a PHPBay’ site can be hit or miss in Google. But there are some code customizations you can do to avoid being quickly fingerprinted as having another thin affiliate site:
1. Change up the default template. You don’t need everything created by PHPBay to be a link. All link and no text? Change it so only the graphics are linked. Or maybe just the text. And change the default text while you’re at it.
2. Randomize the number of auction listings. Instead of 10 listings per page, as everyone has, use php to get a random number, say between 5 and 15, then use that variable to control how many listings are shown on a page. It size of the content and number of links will thus be different each time the Googlebot comes by.
Within your config.php file, do something like this:
# MAXIMUM ITEMS PER PAGE $randomnum = mt_rand (5,15); $config['paging_num'] = $randomnum;
3. Change the default image url used for seo links. PHPBay by default makes the urls for images to be your domains/images/e/number.jpg. That ‘/images/e/’ is called a footprint. Within your ebay.php file find this line:
var $image_replace = "images/e/";
and change it to something else, such as good keyword.
Then, in your .htaccess file change all references to ‘^images/e/’ to your new location.
4. Change the default item listing for seo links. PHP by default makes each product link ‘item-’ followed by the product name. That, again, is a footprint. Within config.php, under Basic Options, find this line:
$config['url_prefix'] = "item-";
and change it to some other word, such as keyword, followed by the hyphen.
Then, in your .htaccess file, change the references to ‘^item’ to your keyword.
There you have it, 4 easy ways to change your PHPBay footprint so you don’t automatically scream to Google – hey, eBay affiliate site here. There are already enough stories of how Google hates eBay affiliate sites without adding yours to the collection.
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