Has you BANS niche store been de-indexed from google and dropped like a hot rock? Do you think google is attacking all BANS sites?
This post is part of the Watch Me Build a BANS Niche Site from Scratch series!
I’m tired of hearing all the people in the Digital Point forums, Build a Niche Store forums, and in blog comments about BANS sites being targeted by google – and they just heard about somebody who had “50 sites manually de-indexed this morning”. Look – IMHO, google isn’t targeting BANS sites at all. It just so happens that the majority of BANS sites are crap sites, practically no better than spam. Read Thin Affiliate Sites are Dead by Mark, The Niche Store Builder.
First he defines what a “thin affiliate” is. It’s a page that exists to forward you to another page so you can make money. And what is “BANS” software in the first place? It’s an entire “thin affiliate site in a box” script – isn’t it? So, right out of the box, google hates BANS niche stores! There are two more important pieces of information in that post, one is that the thin affiliate page has “no value added content”, and if the scraped content (product or eBay info) was removed from the page – all that would remain would be spam.
Now, a lot of you reading this may think I’m telling you not to buy BANS and not to build niche stores anymore. That couldn’t be further from the truth. You CAN do it, and you CAN STILL be profitable, and you CAN STILL STAY INDEXED in google. You just have to work harder, and more honestly than you maybe have in the past. I’ve been trying to change this blog a bit and make it more realistic when it comes to the work required to build a monthly income online. You may already have noticed my graphic on the homepage to that effect. There is no “golden goose” or “money tree” online. Even if you find some loophole to short term success, your money stream will dry up and you will be left with nothing once you are found out.
Let me be very clear about BANS “Build a Niche Store” software…
You can make money from it…
But, a fresh BANS store is nothing more than “spam in a box…” for your web site.
Why BANS stores get banned from google:
BANS stores get “banned” or “de-indexed” by google for having no value at all beyond the “scraped” auctions from eBay. If your only intent is to make money promoting eBay auctions google WILL FIND YOU and manually REMOVE YOU from their index. If you purchase traffic through Adwords or other means you have NOTHING to worry about, but if you get ORGANIC traffic and want to CONTINUE to get organic google search traffic – you MUST ADD SIGINIFICANT VALUE and CONTENT to your BANS site beyond the auctions to succeed!
Now then, unless you plan to just keep on complaining – this is what I suggest you do immediately…before the rest of your BANS stores get jerked from the big G index.
- Remove auctions from your BANS home page: Fill your front end with content, content, content!
- Prune your store navigation down to the most essential pages: This is especially true if your store pages are like 50-100, but your content pages are under 10!
- Ditch Adsense: If you’re using Adsense on your BANS site – ditch it for now unless your BANS site is really content heavy. Some people have been getting emails from Adsense about potentially shutting their account down because they had really this BANS pages with Adsense on them
- Strive for 50% content+ sitewide: This may be a VERY high mark to strive for (especially if your BANS site has dozens of store pages – but let’s face it…if you do this you won’t only be making google happy. That many content pages will get you GOOD organic traffic and increase the value of your site 10-fold anyway.
- Have MORE on a domain than just BANS: What – did you think that you could setup 50+ keyword-laden domains and just slap BANS up there, and then the cash would start rolling in? Don’t be an IDIOT, put MORE on those domains than just BANS. Protect your niche – add a blog and integrate BANS into WordPress – that way if BANS or eBay affiliations in general become taboo or no longer profitable, you still have a niche site with REAL content to promote 900 other ways!
If you remember only ONE thing from this post – let it be this…if you removed all the auctions from your BANS store would there be anything left of value at all? If you can honestly say “Yes!”, you have a good BANS store that deserves to be in the google index. If you say “No.” – then I think you either have some work to do, or just resign yourself to the fact that from now on all your traffic will only be coming in through Yahoo! and MSN Live Search.
GREAT Post John!!
You took it a step farther than I did by proving the ANSWER and WAYS to avoid the problem before it occurs!
Mark
Mark – The Niche Store Builders last blog post..Is Matt Cutts Wearing a Black Hat?
In a rush to get the site out there and make money, people always manage to forget that it takes a unique amount of time and effort to build it into something worthwhile. If you don’t think it’s worthwhile enough to help develop it into something legit, a visitor won’t think it’s worthwhile enough to spend their time (or money,) and Google for damn sure won’t see value in indexing it.
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Great info. Im slowly adding the content I need. I have 5 sites and am trying to get two new pages to each, each week. Ill take your advice and change my landing page. Thanks. Oh you forgot to tell us the importance of having a Privacy Policy (another reason for deindexing).
I’m going to try them too.
Thanks for the info!
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I’m wondering if you think it is still necessary to remove all ebay auction links from the home page if the site itself is integrated with wordpress?
@Mark Grasinski – if it’s integrated with WordPress I would probably say it’s not AS important to remove the auctions from the BANS home page, but it’s probably something I would do anyway. I would add content and descriptions of all the store pages and section of the BANS site if it were me.
Build it and they will come……Good original content is a must. Dropping ebay from the front page is a great idea. If you have problems writing content for the front page, just put the site’s goals, how to navigate around the site, and what they will find inside there.
Great post John. I have 3 bans sites that have a lot of content and 10 that have little to no content. My 3 sites with a lot of content get 100 times more traffic than my 10 sites with little content. It is not worth it to create the thin sites.
You are absolutely right!
I’m not surprised that google banned poor content sites.
We have to ask ourselves a question: does our site increase the user expirience. Does it give any valuable information for someone looking for the product we are selling in our bans?
If the answer is yes, then we shouldn’t worry aboutr Google..
Cheers mate
Nothing could be closer to the truth than what you just said about these BANS sites.
I think the problem started when domainers started slapping up BANS on their 500+ domains EACH.
Multiply that by 10,000 (example), and that’s what will happen, not surprisingly.
All very true however, if you are using Adwords a lack of content will hurt you as well. You’ll find you bid prices are $10 or more for search terms that were 5-25 cents. MSN adcenter is more forgiving….
You can’t do it without putting in some work.
Lets have faith google will know a good BANS site from a bad one. There is no such thing as a free-ride, those who make money quickly and consistently will ALWAYS be the ones who deliver quality content and a great site that people enjoy using.
Thanks for the informative post,
Anthony
iPhone Auctions Australia.
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Should you add content to the store pages or is it ok to provide a link to the store page from your content page?
thanks
This is great advice and happens to come at the perfect time for me as I am in the midst of bulking up the content in 2 of my BANS sites.
The next step is to remove the auctions from the home page. I’ve been considering doing that for a while now and this post has provided the impetus to do it.
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I was one of those affiliates that got their BANS store de-indexed in Google. Thankfully I’m pulling plenty of traffic now from yahoo and MSN and the majority of sales come from Adwords…so no big deal. I feel that my site added value, contained content, but yes…was there to be an affiliate site so it’s expected that it would eventually at least be penalized.
Ironic enough my site still has a PR3 instead of the dreaded N/A and was recently crawled, so hope may still be there.
Possibly causes I feel for my site being de-indexed was the fact that I took cloaking off of my links to test EPN tracking. The entire few months up until that there was no issue with the cloaked links and Google sending some traffic. Time will tell and content is currently being schemed. 😉
@Jack – Personally if it were me, I’d add content to every single store page I could (and I’m a victim of not doing this myself – and I know I have to get it done)
These store in a box products are less and less useful over time. They are great for the early adopter but as everyone has one it’s essentially the tide raising all ships, now you need to go to the next level. To maintain the earnings you had early on.
If you got off your ass and built a real site it would grow over time. You’d not be subject to the rising tide.
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Hey Crusty, I have news for you, even a custom built affiliate script will be subject to these lashings. The best option would be to sell your own products, to be less likely of being underneath Google’s foot, but hey, aren’t we all affiliates?
@Chris – actually I think that a custom built affiliate script would be far less scrutinized unless it had glaring deficiencies (uncloaked links, do follow links). The reasons BANS is under scrutiny in the first place is it was adopted by black hat spammers as a way to put up thousands of stores at once. If it wasn’t for that it probably wouldn’t be under fire in the first place, but add to it the fact that 80% of the people buying BANS think they can make money with no work at all, there’s thousands more shoddy “thin affiliate” sites.
I think the fact of the matter is, custom built script or not if you build a good site you probably won’t have much to worry about unless you accidentally get got in the “BANS” (or current google) crossfire…
“80% of the people buying BANS think they can make money with no work at all, there’s thousands more shoddy “thin affiliate” sites.”
I would probably put that into the mid 90% range… of the +12,000 bans owners, there are probably only a few hundred at most, that spend more time than… point-click-install-rinse and repeat!
You have to admit though… it was a GREAT way to monetize domains up through a few months ago!
Mark
Mark – The Niche Store Builders last blog post..My Big Idea – Taking Baby Steps!
I agree 100% with all of this. I am dismayed by the gullibility of the people that are following a certain blogger un leashed into creating a bunch of crappy sites. It brings the whole community down.
These people think one article is “a bunch of quality content” and that all you have to do is go social bookmarking to riches. So far from the truth.
I suspect the latest round of Google algo tweaks is part of a bigger thrust to rewarding fresh content, and de-emphasizing a site just because it has a lot of (old) pages.
Quality over quantity.
Yes, it’s true that a lot of people don’t do well by just slapping BANS up… but thats OK, because it leaves us, the experts 😉 with all the hits and subsequent income. As for that unleashed blogger… lets see how well he goes now.
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You need to add content because the ebay feeds are RSS. RSS is a dead givaway to G that you get automated freshly scraped content.
@Jose – explain why you think eBay can even figure out that you are getting the content via RSS? That all happens behind the scenes…
My site is not being indexed by Google anymore, any suggestions how to get Google to have it indexed again?
Thanks
@baby – I really can’t say because I haven’t seen your site. It could a dot info, low on content, spammy, heavy on ads – there could be any number or reasons you got a penalty and were removed…and it could a 30, 60, 90, 120 day or even a year penalty.
How do you know if your site got de-indexed?
easy, go to google and type in site:www.yoursite.com and see if you come up or not
Go to Google, type site:yoursitedomainhere.com
If no results show up, it’s been banned. Also, if you check PR and it comes up N/A is an indication.
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Ok I havent been deindexed but is there an easy way to check the PR of a site? Thanks!
I just learned about BANS sites getting de-indexed by Google and wanted to research it a little. I am looking at a few sites and so far, you;re describing exactly what I’m finding. It’s not hard for Google to find these sites, as the software leaves a signature.