Ok, I’ve been getting a ton of emails asking about the type of widgets I’m using to replace PHPBay auctions on my sites. There are a few different ways to do it, but I think the best widgets come frmo the Custom Banner Generator. This is a new EPN tool that is still in Beta, however it can easily be accessed from your EPN dashboard.
To start generating new ads, you’ll want to log in to your EPN account. Then click on Tools, then Widgets. On the next screen you’ll see 4 options. Click Custom Banner Generator. From there you’ll be able to customize your EPN widget. For doing this, I generally recommend following the same basic guidelines you would if you were setting up AdSense on your site. I personally prefer a 336×280 box that I can place right into the content, but you could also go with the large horizontal or vertical skyscrapers, or pretty much whatever you prefer.
You can also customize the colors. I like using a basic blue link, red text color scheme, but it’s probably not a bad idea to mess around with different colors – especially if you’re going to be implementing on a large amount of sites.
Next you’ll scroll down on the page and enter a campaign ID for the tool. If you’re using an existing campaign ID, just start typing the name of the campaign and the tool will bring up suggestions from your existing campaigns.
Last you’ll need to enter your search term. I’ve found that this tool delivers pretty relevant results – even better than PHPBay, however I’ve also discovered that if you want to filter certain terms from your results, you can do so by adding a – sign. So for example you could enter: Your Keyword -Filter, and the result would be auctions containing Your Keyword, but not Filter. Hopefully that makes sense.
A preview of the ad will appear so you can make sure everything is kosher, then all you need to do is copy the script that the tool spits out at the bottom of the page, and paste into your site.
Obviously this tool isn’t going to work for everyone. If you’re making a bunch of thin sites with pages of auction listings, you will probably want to use the RSS feed generator instead, but this particular tool works in a similar way that AdSense does, so if you’ve got a content rich site, it should be no problem.
100 EPN Site Update
Since my report on Monday night, I’ve been feverishly working on removing PHPBay from all of my sites. It’s a lot of work because I have to remove the tags from each individual post, which over 100 sites, adds up to hundreds, if not thousands of posts. Then I need to generate a custom ad and update the template files for each theme, so it’s a ton of work. I’ve got about 65 sites done so far, and I hope to have the last 35 done by the end of the day tomorrow. So far the results have been promising. My clicks for yesterday were up 100%, my EPC went up slightly, and obviously my earnings also increased, although I haven’t had a ton of clicks or sales from my 100 EPN sites that I’ve recently switched over. I expect it will take a while for those sites to get back into the swing of things. Once they are unpenalzied, they will begin sending actual targeted traffic which should result in much better conversions. The results I’m seeing from the newley switched over sites is pretty much the same as what I shared with you all on Monday night – as soon as the sites are getting spidered, their rankings seem to be immediately returning. I’ve been mostly focusing on just getting PHPBay off of all the sites and adding the new EPN widgets, so I haven’t been spending a lot of time trying to get each site spidered right away. I think I will let nature run its course – at least the rest of this week, and hopefully a good chunk of the sites will naturally get spidered. Then I can reasses next week and see if I need to take further action to get the last bunch back ranking again.
Either way, this week has been unbelievable and the results were completely unexpected. I never imagined that PHPBay was the thing causing me so much trouble, but I’m really looking forward to finally being able to dig back into these sites, get them ranking, find out what ads work, and go from there.
Update 8/09/10
I’m afraid I was initially too quick to judge PHPBay. I recently ran an additional test… On one of my sites that I had removed PHPBay from and saw it returned to a #2 ranking for its main keyword, I decided to try removing the EPN widgets and replacing them with a regular ebay RSS feed. As soon as the site was spidered, it dropped from #2 to not being in the top 200 results. I replaced the EPN widgets and the site returned to its #2 ranking again. This tells me that the problem was not related to PHPBay, but rather RSS feeds. The reason I can really think of why this would happen would be as a result of adding all the additional content from the feed to a page already targeted towards specific keywords.
I plan to continue posting regularly as any new developments occur. I’ve been getting a lot of email questions, and I ask that everyone please try to ask their questions in the comments on these posts whenever possible – unless you’ve got a question that can’t be shared publicly.
Very interesting and much-needed food for thought! With hundreds of BANS and phpBay sites, I’m very intrigued and can’t wait to see your final results though the thought of replacing BANS/phpBay with the custom banners on each site seems daunting. Please keep us posted!
Is there some code we can wrap around these widgets so they will be ‘inline’; so text goes around the side of them?
Yeah just use a div tag – div style= float:left; padding:0 5px 5px 0 ;
Thanks, took some time to figure out but now I know how to use the div tag with things that aren’t pictures.
Just pulled phpbay off five pages that have never ranked anywhere in the visible serp zone and added the widget to see if they come to life. All five had pbay starting above the fold so I put three in the same location above the fold and two with the widget below the fold.
After six months of EPN and their QPC I have started to ween myself off using phpbay and eventually EPN except in a few cases where they are the only answer. I was seeing too many pbay setups and also suspicious if they were now widespread enough to be causin’ a footprint.
This style widget makes for a nice way to transition as I start pushing cj and adshare affiliates first.
Or you can use Easy Adsense plugin which can automatically make the text wrap around ads.
The problem with this theory is PHPBAY leaves absolutely zero footprint in your source code, which is what Google uses to rank. How would any search engine know otherwise, since you’re hosting the images, the links are coming off of your domain, etc? The problem with BANS was there are footprints of “BANS” all over the place. It makes more sense that you’re revising each post, editing it by removing auctions, and re-pining everyone, thus creating more activity on your site, and getting increased rankings. Unless you’re over populating auctions, I sincerely doubt you are seeing new rankings from pulling phpbay alone.
Hey Max,
Thanks for your input. I don’t think it’s pinging that is making a difference. I have 100 sites I’ve been able to test this on that are all basically the same. In basically every case, the site was not ranking in the top 100 for its main targeted keywords, and literally as soon as I removed PHPBay and the site was crawled again by Google the rankings, and the site will show up between page 1 and 3 in the search result.
I strongly doubt that it has to do with updating each post, because I’ve made many updates to posts on a lot of these 100 sites over the last 6 months, as well as adding additional content to many – including drip feeding posts in many cases. I was also not overpopulating auctions. On a good portion of the sites, I only used a sidebar widget to begin with showing between 1 and 4 auctions. On sites where I used auctions within the content, I only showed 4 auctions per page except in a few cases where I may have shown up to 8.
I’ve been a PHPBay user for 2 years and I’m not necessarily saying anyone shouldn’t buy it. All I’m saying is that my findings are if you put PHPBay on a brand new site, there is a possibility you may get penalized/sandboxed, whatever you want to call it. I have a couple PHPBay sites I’ve built using pre-owned domains since I created these 100 new sites, and the sites on pre-owned domains haven’t received any kind of penalty.
hey Sam, what do think about caffinated content for pulling content on adsense niche sites?
I would absolutely not recommend ever using caffinated content on a site with adsense, or at all for that matter. There are probably people out there doing it and making money, but it’s not really a sustainable method for making money. The only thing I could legitimately see it useful for is blog farms, and even that I wouldn’t bother with. Focus on original, GOOD content and you’ll get the best overall long term results.
I thought you might say that, I was on the fence about taking a shot with it but
I think i agree with you, it seems a little weak.
This may be a dumb question….
I have thin sites and it appears that you would suggest using the RSS widget instead of Custom Banner Generator. Now for the dumb question. How do I add an RSS feed to a WordPress post?
I use the custom banner generator at the moment. I haven’t tried using the EPN RSS tool yet so I really can’t say.
thanks… I’ll keep looking
Do these custom banners generate 301 or 302 redirects? 302’s need to be gone by June 1st, 2010 according to latest epn mail threat.