Second Round of EPN Bannings
An eBay spokesperson posted a message on their message board making note of a larger number of recent affiliate bans or “expirations.”
I wanted to address all of the board posts regarding the expiration emails that were sent last night.
These actions were part of our continued effort to focus on delivering the highest quality buyer traffic to eBay via affiliate marketing. To that end, we’ve been analyzing our program closely over the last few months. I know there have been a number of requests to provide insight into all of the metrics via which we are evaluating affiliate traffic, but unfortunately there’s an active black hat community that is pretty effective at exploiting these insights so we can’t go into details on them. However, what I can say is that in addition to earnings per click metrics (EPC), we look at a variety of metrics to see how users are behaving when they come to eBay.com – how engaged they are with our site, and whether the affiliate link clicks lead to incremental buying activity. As we’ve done this, we have seen a big discrepancy in how interested and active the traffic is that comes to eBay from different sources.
Our responsibility in the affiliate marketing channel is to allocate our resources to best drive incremental demand to our sellers. To that end, we need to focus on partners who have had the most success in engaging users who become some of our best buyers on eBay. I understand that these actions do have a very real impact on some of our affiliates who have been working with us over the years. For that, I sincerely apologize, but these decisions are made in the best interest of eBay’s sellers and the overall health of our affiliate program.
We want to be very clear. Affiliates who received these messages of expiration last night are not being asked to stop sending traffic to us due to fraudulent activity or violations of the terms of service. For those of you who received the message, commissions are not being reversed, and you will be paid for all valid traffic you have sent to us to date, and for the next 7 days.
Sincerely,
Steve
Now, quite frankly, the fact that they are blaming this on the blackhat community is a bit ridiculous. It is, in fact, their responsibility to safeguard their own systems. These gentleman essentially skirted around the real question, which is “What does real traffic look like to you guys?” They say they can’t release specific information about the metrics they are using due to the blackhat community exploiting them, but the fact of the matter is that most of the metrics they could use are blatantly obvious and have already been discussed in great detail by people in the know.
The first and potentially the hardest metric to combat is on-site behavior tracking. That is to say, what users that click EPN affiliate links do once they are on eBay. It is unlikely for all users who come from a single affiliate to only go to the first page they are presented. While this might be the case a majority of the time, general traffic patterns indicate that something between 10-15% of users will travel at least one page deeper. This number rises and falls depending on the quality of the on-page content as well the relevance of the link, but this is a good baseline to begin to look at.
Lots of ideas are floating around the office at the moment with ways to combat this, though it should be stated clearly that nothing is in the works yet. We should also note that we’ve received no reports of people utilizing our cookie stuffing method being banned and that we have not been directly effected by these bannings.
Update and EPN Warning
We just wanted to make a quick update and let everyone know that Meta-Marketing: Cookie Stuffing Edition has officially sold out. We’d like to thank everyone who purchased and reviewed this product and ask that you forward any questions you have to us rather than discussing them publicly. We believe in good customer support and would like to keep all questions and comments internal. We’re considering launching a private forum for this very purpose. More on that in the near future.
At the beginning of September, we will be bringing on our second full-time employee. Up until now, the brunt of the work has been done by one full-time individual and a handful of volunteers and contributors. This new member of the blackhatzen crew is highly capable and has known everyone here for quite a few years. We’re very excited and believe that his addition will allow us to provide even better products, ideas, and customer service to our faithful customers and clients.
On a darker note, we’d like to warn everyone that this is the time of the month when people start to get banned from EPN and it seems to be happening on a much broader scale than usual this month. Many black hat sites and forums are beginning to hide or further obscure their information to ensure the security and safety of their users. We believe this is a good idea and will are becoming more tight-lipped about the highest quality techniques and saving them for individuals who are capable of creating sustainable online revenue streams. So, as a word of warning, play it safe.
AutoPligg Progress Update
We posted a review of Syndk8’s AutoPligg roughly a week ago. We wanted to give you an update a week into our experiment. While our test site has received a few hundred unique visitors from Pligg sites, most of the traffic was not well targeted to our niche. This is our fault for deciding to use AutoPligg indiscriminately. However, the real success has been in the SERP increases. We’ve seen movements from top 100 to top 3 for keyword searches ranging from low competitiveness to extremely high competitiveness. Needless to say, one week in and we’re very pleased with the results.
Black Hat World Donation Drive
As many of our faithful readers know, Black Hat World is one of our main points of operation. We love the admins, staff, and VIPs there and consider them good friends. If you frequent BHW, you know that they’ve been having some server issues lately. Instead of talking about the up-time issues, let’s try and fix them. They need a new, bigger, better, and badder server to handle all of the traffic and we’d like to assist them in getting enough donations to make that a financially sound and reasonable solution.
We’d like to offer an incentive. Anyone who joined BHW before today who donates any amount is open for a discount on their next purchase from us. All you have to do to be added to the donators discount list is PM us your PayPal transaction ID on BHW.
We’ve started a Donation Drive thread here.
Meta-Marketing: Cookie Stuffing Edition Almost Sold Out!
We’ve had two more people who asked for us to hold copies back out, so we’ve got another two copies that are open for sale. If you have any questions, feel free to contact us. Otherwise, you can purchase and receive instant digital delivery by going to the Meta-Marketing: Cookie Stuffing Edition sales page.
Brief Review of Syndk8’s AutoPligg
While this is not our normal modus operandi, we just wanted to share a new tool we’ve been made aware of and have had the opportunity to test. We are not being paid by the creator(s) nor are we affiliated with their company. We will not provide any technical support for their product. With that out of the way, we’d like to talk about Syndk8’s AutoPligg application.
We have to admit that we were very, very skeptical at first. The long term SEO value of applications like this has never excited us. For a short blast, they can be effective, but generally they are the quickest route to your local sandbox. However, at least for the time being, AutoPligg appears to do what it says it can do and it does it pretty damn well. For those who are unaware, Pligg is an open-source web application that is very similar to the extremely popular Digg platform. This allows a user community to vote and comment on links that they either like or dislike. There are quite a few Pligg sites floating around the web.
Essentially what AutoPligg does is automate the creation of accounts, as well as the submission and commenting of links. It’s as simple as that. While most people will definitely abuse this application and spam their links, we believe that more intelligent marketers will realize the potential of targeting the sites to which they list their stories.
The brief test we did, definitely seemed to show that AutoPligg is effective at increasing the short term SERPs of targeted low volume, low competition, long tail keywords. We can’t speak of the application’s long term value as we haven’t had access to it for a long enough period of time to really tell. It is extremely simple to use and doesn’t seem to be too much of a resource hog in it’s current incarnation. CAPTCHA cracking makes the account creation process much easier and the inclusion of proxy support was a great idea. Last, but not least, it’s price tag, only $189, is definitely in the right ballpark for this kind of application. If the makers keep it updated, this could be one of the better purchases a smart marketer makes this year.
The biggest fault we could find was it’s speed. From what we understand, the makers are working on a multi-threaded version which would make this application, much, much faster and that much better. That said, even though the application isn’t fast, it is automated, which almost makes up for it’s speed. We’d love to see a faster version in the near future.
We’ll post an updated review once we see how our results pan out over a longer period of time.
R.I.P. Dr. Randy Pausch
We’d like to take this time to send our condolences to the family and friends of Dr. Randy Pausch of Carnegie Mellon University who died today after a battle with pancreatic cancer. While only one member of the blackhatzen crew ever had the pleasure of being taught by this brilliant man, his search for balance and excellence in the computer science field will never be forgotten.
Thank you for everything, Professor Pausch.
Meta-Marketing: Cookie Stuffing Edition Update!
We’re very excited to say that we’re officially down to our last 10 copies of this very successful method. We sold the first 90 copies in a little less than a week. The reviews have been glowing and we’re really excited with the positive response we’ve had so far. If you’re interested in seeing some of the reviews, you should check out our Buy, Sell, Trade thread on Black Hat World. Quite a few of the VIPs, moderators, and even an administrator have given our second Meta-Marketing offering a positive review. We’d like to thank everyone who has purchased, with a special thanks to everyone who took time out of their busy lives to leave us a review.
For all of the people who have been asking, our next offering will most likely be our guide to getting fantastic AdWords Quality Scores. Stay tuned for more from blackhatzen in the near future.
Meta-Marketing: Cookie Stuffing Edition Released!
We’ve finally released our next Meta-Marketing product! This product focuses on the hot topic of cookie stuffing and includes a great method that brought in more than $3,000 last month alone. We’ve decided to post a proof of income video here. The last one sold out in only a few, short weeks and got a lot of great reviews. We’ll be keeping our website visitors abreast of any reviews we receive. As always, if anyone has any questions, feel free to contact us.
Business Trips, Guest Posts, and New Products - Oh My!
Our apologies for the lack of posts in the last week or so. In the near future we’ll be back to our normal selves. We’ve lined up some blog posts that we think are pretty awesome including a guest post by a well-respected member of the Black Hat World community about a new kind of stuffing that we think people are really going to get excited about. We’re also very close to releasing Meta-Marketing: Cookie Stuffing Edition. We don’t want to give out many details yet, but let’s just say that with about 20 hours of work and a bit of patience and skill, we were able to pull in over $3,000 from EPN last month from a single site. We’ll also be releasing some new details on our very popular Return on Investment Research System (ROiRS) project in the next few weeks.
All in all, we’ve been very busy this summer and are starting to line-up some great content for our clients, customers, and readers. Check back for more in the immediate future.