More often than not, I see users that go out of their way to mask anything that is related to Ebay, but in your case, you are using direct widgets, which illustrates the insignificance of footprints when we are doing things the right way.

Sentence one notes they were not deindexed, but later on you state:

“as soon as the sites were reindexed and PHPBay was off of them the rankings returned and they ranked where I would have expected them to based on the results of the same project I did with AdSense sites – this happened in basically every case.”

I’d still like the opportunity to review a few of the sites.

I have many customers that rely heavily on organic traffic and make a lot of money in EPN. The experiences you are reporting seem more along the lines of those that develop thin sites, or have sites still in the sandbox. Definitely not representative of many of my customers.

Good luck with your future projects.

Wade

In the case of my EPN sites, as soon as the sites were reindexed and PHPBay was off of them the rankings returned and they ranked where I would have expected them to based on the results of the same project I did with AdSense sites – this happened in basically every case. You’ll see in early March I posted that I was planning to swap out PHPBay on some of my sites and replace with EPN widgets. I did it a few days later. That night I came home and noticed about 60% of the sites I had swapped widgets in on had been spidered and were ranking in the top 20 search results, then I immediately posted about it here: http://www.wpcontempo.com/100-epn-sites-a-new-development/.

I haven’t misrepresented anything that’s happened to me at all – this is pretty much exactly what happened. For the most part, this project was a complete failure and money sink for the first 6+ months, and I’ve been brutally honest about the results here. I’m definitely not making anything up. Like I said, I would have strongly preferred to use PHPBay over EPN widgets. I wouldn’t rule out the possibility of some kind of problem on my end, but I took extremely special care to make sure there was no footprints on any of these sites. I’d like to see someone else make a handful of PHPBay niche sites on brand new domains, using wordpress, and see what their results are.

That’s a given, though. Years ago, I built some sites that were neither ebay or amazon related. Clean, white hat sites. I got the initial “love” from google in the first six to eight weeks. After that? Well, it was nine months before the sites started having any type of ranking in the top 100. I did all the right things. I did link building, 100% unique content (with no skimping) rotate the top three keywords for links, on page SEO, articles, blog posts. Eventually, though, after that sandbox period, the site was generously rewarded. It just takes time.

I talk about that on the forum. The sandbox effect is prone to any type of new site, regardless of whether it’s affiliate or not.

I’d appreciate the opportunity to look at some of those sites.

“This change literally took place on the same day I swapped the ads.”

That would be a remarkable coincidence if so. I can’t recall anything in recent seo history where someone made a single change like that to a site and overnight, was re-indexed.

I do agree with you on the aged domains. That goes to back to part of the sandbox effect. New domains generally are not going to rank for any type of competitive keyword. There are lots of arguments over the “sanbox effect,” but I’ve experienced it first hand, many times over the years. Most of my sites, it’s taken around nine months. That’s why older sites will rank better, because they are past that sandbox effect.

Thanks for your continued support. I’ve had quite a few emails recently and even one forum post asking about all this. As you can imagine, one person’s experiences can cause concern for others, so I wanted to provide some input and let everyone know there is a very good article I wrote on the forums that address many of these things.

If I can do anything for you, Sam, please let me know.

Thanks for stopping by. I think you mixed up a very old post of mine with the results of my more recent 100 EPN sites experiment. The original post you referred to was regarding a network of thin sites I had set up that were ranking well, and got deindexed. These were basically the definition of a thin site, with literally no actual content – just pages of PHPBay auctions.

My 100 EPN site experiment was completely different, and in response to what had transpired previously. I agree that it is extremely difficult for anyone to set up 100 quality sites in one month, and if you actually read my posts on this, it ended up taking almost 2 months. Not only that, but I spent over $5000 in outsourcing content both for the sites, and for link building on this project. Each site has many pages of unique, well written content. I show only a small amount of auctions per page, usually no more than 4 total or in some cases only 1-4 auctions in the sidebar and no auctions within the content. Not only that, but at least 80% of the themes I used were unique, and I spread the sites out amongst a lot of different servers.

The result was that none of the 100 sites ranked for any of their main or related keywords within the top 100 Google results. I continued adding content and link building for the sites. This started in August. By March, none of my sites had any kind of rankings in Google at all. On a whim, around the middle of March, I decided to take a handful of the 100 sites, remove PHPBay from the sites, and replace with EPN widgets. As soon as the sites with the EPN widgets were re-spidered by Google, they returned to ranking within the first 20 results for their MAIN keyword. This change literally took place on the same day I swapped the ads. As a result, I made the change to the rest of my 100 sites, and the results were exactly the same for every single one.

Based on these overall results, I have found it very hard to believe it was anything other than PHPBay that was causing me to get penalized. The fact that after over 6 months, all I had to do was simply remove PHPBay and replace it with an EPN widget, and the site would return to ranking overnight tells me that at least in MY case, PHPBay was the culprit.

I’ve done this exact same thing with AdSense and Amazon, and I’ve never had any problem ranking a site right away. I’m choosing incredibly easy keywords to rank for and I know what I’m doing. These sites aren’t thin, contain quality content, and in most cases I would feel comfortable standing up to a manual inspection with them. That was the whole point of me building the sites to begin with – to put together quality sites that would stand the test of time. Personally I would have much preferred to use PHPBay instead of EPN widgets, but at least now all 100 sites are making me money like they should, and I’ve recouped the original expense to get them all set up.

It’s not a knock on PHPBay at all. It’s one of the only IM products I think is worthy of paying for. It’s one of only 3 products I promote as an affiliate. Not only that, but I’ve continued to build more PHPBay sites on expired domains, and they work perfectly fine. In my case, the only time I am seeing any kind of penalty is when I put PHPBay on a brand new domain.

This is all just my own personal experience. A few others have chimed in here, but all I can say for sure is what I know based on what I’ve actually seen happen over the past 6+ months. I wouldn’t discourage anyone from purchasing PHPBay, I have a great deal of respect for Wade, who provides amazing support and work on the product, and none of this was an attempt to get people to avoid PHPBay. In fact, I would recommend it to anyone who wants to be an EPN affiliate. All of my top performing EPN sites run PHPBay, and I’ve made thousands of dollars using it over the past several years. The only caveat is that anyone who puts PHPBay on a brand new domain could POTENTIALLY see the same results as me. Then again, maybe they won’t.

Wade from phpBay Pro. Just wanted to add some comments to this thread to hopefully clear up some misconceptions.

There is no such thing as a “phpBay Pentalty” in Google. Bans got a bad/undeserved rap over this several years ago. Most experienced affiliate marketers know that Google does in fact target “thin affiliate” sites. By “thin,” I mean little effort, no content, no unique content, no meta description/keywords, etc. Just sites built with nothing more than affiliate links are the source for the content.

This seems to have been covered here in a previous post:

http://www.wpcontempo.com/google-deindexing-phpbay-and-other-epn-affiliate-sites/

“I outlined in my EPN Tutorial the importance of adding unique content to each page of your site, including product pages. Unfortunately, we all know that getting the unique content to support each page of your site can be a real pain. I haven’t necessarily always practiced what I preach, and I’ve found that some of my thinner sites with very little content got hit the hardest.”

I’ve written about this in the phpBay Pro support forum in great detail, several years ago. Called “The Ultimate Roadmap to Success,” it covers many of these common sense issues. I wrote this because I’ve been doing SEO and affiliate marketing a long time and I knew many of my customers could use a roadmap, could use experience that others have gone through and tips and tricks that work as well as what doesn’t work.

It would be really challenging to setup 100 quality sites in one month. Quality is subjective, of course, but it would be difficult to setup 100 simple sites with nothing more than affiliate links in a month. You are talking three plus sites per day, every day (including weekends). Site setup, theme selection/modification, adding pages/posts/categories, adding keywords and meta descriptions, as well as unique content (more than a line or two). That’s a tall order!

Also covered in the roadmap I wrote is the importance of link building. Many beginning affiliate marketers are not aware of how important link building is to the success of a site. Of equal importance is the google sandbox, which has been around at least since late 2005. The idea is, that you build a new site and get some initial rankings. You think everything is good, then after about two months, go over to the sandbox. This doesn’t just affect affiliate sites, but virtually any type of new site created. The idea being, that google isn’t just going to start ranking a new site for competitive keywords without some effort to the site.

Just wanted to chime in with some views on this. I saw BANS get an undeserved bad rap over this sort of thing when the problem is really related to building thin affiliate sites that rely upon affiliate links as content.

The phpBay Pro forums has a great deal of information, including very lengthy discussions on the “Roadmap to success,” as well as ebay affiliates that make big money using phpBay Pro and getting organic traffic doing so.

Google doesn’t target any affiliate software products, they target “thin affiliate” sites and the key to success is not so much the software used, but rather the process used and the effort put into it. Two to three quality sites done the right way will always outperform 100 sites with nothing more than affiliate links for content.

Do a search for: “powered by phpBay Pro” on Google. As of today, there are 2,690,000 results (through the data center served in my part of the country). If google were targeting/deindexing phpBay Pro specifically, they could simply remove all those results in one fell swoop. BTW, “powered by phpBay Pro” is optional and can be removed from listings. Some use it for their affiliate link, some simply leave it in, so that’s a very small representation of the pages out there and would be the absolute easiest to target if in fact google were deindexing based on the product name.

Sam, give me a shout if you want. I’d be happy to go over some things that can help you and your loyal following. I want to see people succeed. There are also ways to make “thin” sites perform well too, using long tail keywords. Dan (OneLung) on our support forums has written a lot about this as well.

It’s never too late to start succeeding!