Link Building with eBay

August 30, 2008 by
Filed under: Link Building 

The mammoth shopping site eBay.com needs no introduction. Being one of the top 20 most popular websites of all time, millions of dollars worth of auctions go through it every year. Today’s post is not about how you can earn a part of that money through software like BANS, which I will leave for another day, but rather how you can utilize this massive authority site to bring your measly little website more search engine traffic.

Sure, you could create an ebay auction trying to sell something, and secretly put a link to your website in the thread, but a few months after the auction ends, when your thread finally receives some decent pagerank, the thread would expire.

Well, there is a better way. eBay has an area for their members to create their own eBay blogs. You can check it out at blogs.ebay.com. Now, if you look carefully, you will notice that this page has a very nice pagerank 6, and is linking to the most recent blog posts made by eBay members.

The process for leeching some of eBay’s incredible authority and increasing the website traffic to your own website is simple:

  1. Sign up for an eBay account if you do not already have one.
  2. Setup your blog with your anchor text as the name of the blog.
  3. Add a little description to your blog, but save the core description for your actual blog post.
  4. Add a new post with your anchor text again, but this time include a well written paragraph with a dofollow anchor text link to your site. Feel free to make the link even stronger by adding a bold/italic tag, adding a title tag, etc.
  5. Publish your blog
  6. Check blogs.ebay.com to make sure the PR6 recent page is linking to your new blog.

Now, not only does this powerful pagerank 6 link get your blog/pages indexed quickly, but it is also assisted by the PR4-5 ebay pages of different countries (blogs.ebay.ca for Canada, and so forth). The end result is that my test blog as well as my test blog post both got indexed and cached in Google in under 24 hours, without the help from any single work of my own.

You can see my example eBay blog here:
http://blogs.ebay.com/collinlahay/

There are a few other link building strategies to make this method even stronger.

Frequent Updating Method

You can write a simple 100-200 word update once every so often to increase the amount of content on your blog, and to give yourself another backlink or two. This will also push your blog back onto the most recent posts section again, getting your new post indexed as fast as the first one.

Greyhat Promotion Technique
I just want to start out saying that I do not condone this technique, but I know of people who are doing it so I figure I will post about it anyway. With that being said, you could use link spamming software or grey/blackhat promotional techniques to build a ton of authority to your eBay page in a very short amount of time. Because eBay is such an authority site, you can avoid your site being sandboxed/banned from Google and so you can get away with building a lot more links than you normally could without any risk to your main site. The end game theory is that you can greyhat promote your eBay blog to get a high pagerank and so it gives your site a stronger backlink without putting your actual site into any greyhat promotional risk.

This is part 36 of my link building cookbook, the ultimate free guide to building unique links to your website to increase your search engine traffic.

Comments

34 Comments on Link Building with eBay

  1. Larry on Sat, 30th Aug 2008 8:30 pm

    2. Thanks for the info Colin, I have used ebay for selling but I di not know you can set up a blog.

  2. Sudarshan on Sun, 31st Aug 2008 1:18 am

    3. Colin I never thought that the links are dofollow

  3. jasonyu988 on Sun, 31st Aug 2008 9:28 am

    4. I have created a ebay blog about replica watches: http://blogs.ebay.com/jasonyu9882008/

  4. Sacramento Weddings on Mon, 1st Sep 2008 9:02 am

    5. Thank you for the excellent tip…..this is the first time I’d heard about blogs at E-Bay.

  5. Chris Guthrie on Mon, 1st Sep 2008 11:25 am

    6. Hey Colin, nice tip. I just tried this out as well and will be mentioning this post in my next week’s link wrap up.

    Might I suggest that you add to the list these steps:

    When writing your post be sure to check the box “View Source” before you input the HTML code otherwise it will not work.

    Either way, great idea. I took it one step further and added a link on my “about me” page on eBay as well.

  6. Regan Johnson on Mon, 1st Sep 2008 11:23 pm

    7. Thanks for the tip, Collin.

  7. Barry Wise NJ SEO on Tue, 2nd Sep 2008 4:50 am

    8. Thanks, I never thought of this one … keep ‘em coming!

  8. ipod repair on Tue, 2nd Sep 2008 7:10 am

    9. Are those blog links dofollow?

  9. Sacramento Weddings on Tue, 2nd Sep 2008 8:07 am

    10. Hey Colin, I wanted to post a comment on your latest thread (about moving into the dorm)— I had just moved my 17 year old daughter into her dorm room at UC Berkeley— but your comments are “closed?”

  10. Coby on Tue, 2nd Sep 2008 1:13 pm

    11. Thank you for this great tip. I had no idea that there were ebay blogs. I went ahead and set one up for myself. I have been reading many of the tips on your site and wanted to give you a general thank you for all the great information!

  11. Joel Drapper on Tue, 2nd Sep 2008 3:00 pm

    12. Sounds great, but I can’t sign up for an ebay account until I am 18 years old!

  12. Link Building Blog on Tue, 2nd Sep 2008 9:57 pm

    13. Ahh nuts.. the cat is out of the bag :)

  13. Julie on Wed, 3rd Sep 2008 4:10 am

    14. Collin, your tips are quite interesting and may be of great usage for me , thanks a lot

  14. Collin LaHay on Wed, 3rd Sep 2008 8:27 am

    15. Yeah, didn’t have any time to moderate comments.

  15. Coby on Wed, 3rd Sep 2008 10:04 am

    16. I just wanted to add that when I searched for one of my keywords today in google my ebay blog was on page 2 and I just did it yesterday!

  16. Jackson on Thu, 4th Sep 2008 12:17 am

    17. Thanks Colin, these tips are fantastic. Love your work!

  17. Tokyo Sound Lounge on Thu, 4th Sep 2008 4:42 am

    18. Best link building tip i have read all day.
    Thanks alot Colin

  18. Meltin on Mon, 8th Sep 2008 10:00 pm

    19. Great tip. Thanks so much!

  19. Claudia on Thu, 11th Sep 2008 12:08 am

    20. I ddn’t know that member can created blog in eBay. It’s a must try tip considering that the page rank is 6. Thanks!

  20. CoolProducts on Fri, 12th Sep 2008 2:01 pm

    21. Very insightful! Thanks for the tips.

  21. Nirav on Tue, 16th Sep 2008 5:45 am

    22. Excellent post, I have already given it a try. Hope to see the results soon. Bookmarked your site for futures posts like these.

    Cheers!

  22. men and truck on Tue, 16th Sep 2008 3:16 pm

    23. Collin, this is a great info, I’m going to create my blog tonight.

    Thanks for the tip.

  23. Richard R on Tue, 16th Sep 2008 4:28 pm

    24. Do the Ebay blogs have the same restrictions that the listings have in prohibiting linking to outside sites and sources. I am reading the policies on Ebay and it seems to prevent this practice. I hope I am misreading them as this looks too good to be true. Ebay has a practice of acting on breaking policies by members reporting so this may have a shelf life.

  24. PS3 on Wed, 17th Sep 2008 12:13 pm

    25. Brilliant post, very helpful. I have now set up my blog, Thanks!

  25. eco handbags on Fri, 10th Oct 2008 6:25 pm

    26. The eBay “About Me” pages work in a similar way, I have a few links in mine :)

  26. Eric on Tue, 21st Oct 2008 8:35 am

    27. You can’t put links in anymore, it doesn’t activate them.

  27. ipsg007 on Fri, 31st Oct 2008 5:42 am

    28. thanks for the post..
    hats off..

  28. Santiago Martinez on Fri, 31st Oct 2008 1:28 pm

    29. Rocks! thanks for the interesting Article about linking with eBay

  29. mecozz on Sat, 1st Nov 2008 8:21 pm

    30. thanks for your tips, I’ll try it

  30. OnlineMediaLimited.Com on Tue, 6th Jan 2009 8:24 am

    31. Nice tip – however alot of people have regular updates on their blogs so you would need to be constantly updating just to stay on the PR 6 page?

    Seems it worked well for a while but been somewhat abused now by others…

  31. yallwatch on Mon, 27th Apr 2009 2:01 am

    32. Thanks for offering so useful information to us!It’s let me know so many about link buildings!

  32. allxclub review on Sun, 5th Jul 2009 5:07 am

    33. this will definetally get the black hat kids excited !!

  33. Ed Fry on Mon, 21st Dec 2009 10:21 am

    34. Damn it – too late. “eBay Blogs will stopping serving on 31st October 2009″.

    ****

  34. Elmer Czachorowski on Thu, 17th Feb 2011 8:44 pm

    35. Heya! I just wanted to ask if you ever have any trouble with hackers? My last blog (wordpress) was hacked and I ended up losing several weeks of hard work due to no back up. Do you have any methods to protect against hackers?

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