Ebay Spam Pages
Have
you ever looked on the Internet for a product you wanted for
sale? Have you ever found results that sounded promising, only to
find they re-directed you to an Ebay auction?
The page that comes up in the search results isn't really the one
you're looking for. It pretends to be a place where you can buy a
particular product, but it turns out to be merely a frontend for Ebay.
Let's say you have an on-line store selling a piece of "crackle
glass". Some webmaster finds out that's a popular search term,
and he makes an Ebay frontend page. You find, in fact, that half
a dozen other people have made similar frontend pages. All your
hard work is negated, and your page is lost. It would be one
thing if these were real competitors who had their own products to
sell. Instead, it's someone who just wants to increase page
hits. Nothing to offer in return, just a teleport straight to
Ebay.
It's really hurting on-line antique and collectible sellers in particular.
The thing is, all this spam isn't good for Ebay in the long term, either. And
it definitely isn't good for the customer. It's not even good for the
search engines- why keep using Google or Yahoo if their search results are
useless? Contrary to popular belief, there are still a couple
search engines out there that aren't
Google or Yahoo. Try AltaVista,
for example. I was pleasantly surprised to see relatively few Ebay
frontend pages compared to the big G's results. (Unfortunately even
AltaVista isn't 100% devoid of them.)
Ebay and their affiliates should be forced to remove each and every one
of the frontend spam pages from the net. You know, Ebay TV ads were
a good idea. Affiliate spam abuse isn't. I blame Ebay itself
for a lot of this; take a look at their "Affiliate Program Business Models"
on their website. They don't directly tell you to spam, but
then again they don't say not to.
The tips for their Natural Search business model tell someone how to get
listed and how not to get kicked off Google. In no place that I could
find do they spell out that you shouldn't
make Ebay search result front-ends. Maybe it's changed since then,
but I know what I saw.
Ebay is not an evil company-- and if they were, you couldn't say it,
for fear of getting sued-- but it's hard to look at Ebay spam pages as
anything but a Bad Idea. Fortunately, these pages seem to
be on the decline.
.
Index
Copyright: This page may
not be copied or redistributed without written permission from the author.
I'm the author, and I hereby deny permission.