Internet Profits Blog

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.

Does PHPBay Pro work with the WordPress subdomains plugin so that pages can be created as subdomains and eBay auction listings will properly work on the subdomains?

Yep. Works like a charm.

Sometimes you want to ban someone from your website.  To ban someone from accessing your website you need to know their IP address.   You can get their address from your server logs or emails.

If you ban someone, though, they’ll know it, because they will receive a server code informing them access is denied to your site.

Much better than an outright ban is fooling them into believing they are seeing a real page on your website, when in fact they are the only one seeing that page.   Everyone else in the world gets to see your website, but they get to see a fake page, or anything you want, and they’ll never know!

Here is the code you need for your .htaccess file to redirect two IP addresses to a new page whenever they try to access any page on your website:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_HOST} 10\.20\.30\.40 [or]
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_HOST} 11\.22\.33\.44
RewriteRule .* http://yourdomain.com/fakepage.html [R=301,L]

Just replace the two sample IP addresses (10.20.30.40 and 11.22.33.44) with the IP addresses you want to ban.  I included two addresses so you can see how the code works when there is more than one address, using the [or] command.  This can be used over and over for more IP addresses.

Some amateur php programmers, like Robert Plank, do this all wrong, and make it obvious someone is banned from a website.  Making it obvious is not only bush, but a complete waste of time and ineffectual since it will take someone about 30 seconds to sign on through a proxy service to avoid an IP ban.

That is why you need a fake page.   One trick is to send the person to page that mimics what is displayed when there is a server error code.  Then, the idiot you want to ban thinks you’re out of service, when in fact they’re the one out in the cold.