Today I would like to revisit an old post here from The Niche Store Journey.
Back in mid July I wrote a post debating whether or not to use WordPress Blogs, or Build a Niche Store software on the root of your Niche Store domain.
Please take a look at it and familiarize yourself with the reasoning behind it before continuing on to this post, so we can see the evolution of what has happened to BANS the last couple of months.
Here is a link to the old post…
BANS/Blog or Blog/BANS?
So hopefully now you have re familiarized yourself with the questions surrounding where to put your BANS folder and where to install WordPress for your Niche Store sites.
Hopefully by this point you have been sufficiently convinced that as a user of BANS, the ONLY way to effectively use the software is in conjunction with WordPress. With the startling number of ePN affiliates being “expired”, and the growing number of webmasters (myself and other BANS bloggers included!) getting BANS sites de-indexed at Google, making sure that you have a user-oriented Niche website is absolutely crucial.
The best way for us, as users of BANS to accomplish this is to use BANS in conjunction with WordPress to make a more robust and content-driven website.
Now…
You may be wondering why I felt the need to revisit an old post. Well quite frankly, the landscape has changed significantly since July, and if us BANS users intend to weather the storm, we need to be able to adapt!
The rationale behind my previous endorsement of the BANS/Blog layout of Niche Stores was fairly simple. By having your BANS site on the root of your domain, visitors would see eBay auctions right away after coming to your site without needing to click any “Store Page” links. This way, even if you have a very high “bounce rate” at your site, you have a chance at monetizing some of those visitors.
(Bounce rate is the % of unique visitors who leave your website after seeing only the first page they click into… Meaning they do not navigate to any other pages of your site.)
The problem now, is that between Google going on a “thin affiliate site” deindexing rampage, and the eBay Partner Network “expiring” (a.k.a. “kicking out”) droves of webmasters, there is reason to be seriously concerned about our future as BANS users. If someone at Google or eBay is having a bad day, and happens to review one of your sites, your number 1 commission earning site can go from a gold mine to a wasteland in minutes.
So how can we take steps to make sure this does not happen?
Well, putting your WordPress blog on the root of your domain now looks like a necessary step to take. You may lose a few “clicks” on your ePN account, and you might miss on a commission here or there. In the grand scheme of things that is ok! We are primarily concerned at this point with keeping our sites in the Google index, and keeping our ePN account in good standing.
When Google crawls your domains, if they are seeing 10+ eBay affiliate links on the root page, this seems to be a huge red flag right now. By putting a Blog on the root of your domain, you are putting your best foot forward when the spiders come crawling along. Of course, you want that blog to be rich in unique content that is helpful and engaging to your visitors.
If you can create unique and helpful blog entries for your visitors, the all important “clicks” and “bids” from your eBay Store section of your Niche Store will come! But as users of BANS, right now we are being called out by both eBay and Google.
Create unique and helpful websites they are both saying.
The question becomes, are you up to the task?
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I had 22 BANS sites all on the root directory with blogs setup in the /blog directory. I bought some themes to integrate them and decided on scaling back the number of stores that I have so that I can focus on quality stores. Now I have 14 stores which receive quality content often and it seems to be working well.
Jonathons last blog post..Where Did This Blog Go For 6 Months?