Temporary Links

Is short term linking useful?

[Perplexed]

My site is an information resource and is used a great deal ( in terms of percentage of visitors not total numbers )by ebay sellers. Several of these have put a mention of my site, and a link, on their auction listing and these generally produce a worthwhile ( but not huge ) number of visitors.

It is obviously worth persueing this from the visitor numbers point of view but would these 10 day ( or less ) links help towards my PR? ( thinking about it it is more like 3 or 4 weeks because finished auctions are archived )

[heini]

Perplexed, that's an interesting aspect of linking. In short I don't see any drawbacks.
The engines index of the web is necessarily snapshots. They rank according to what they see at a given point in time. If there's alink at the time of crawling than that link will be factored in.
A highly fluctuating link count could lead to rather unstable rankings, but overall your SE positions should benefit from such temporary links.

[vitaplease]

I'm not sure what these auction listings are about, but if they are on the ebay site itself, you might want to check ebay's robots text. I think they have a no-follow policy.

[martinibuster]

ebay seems to allow spidering of individual ebay items. But the url is dynamic (i.e. it has "?" in it).

But it has a PR#3.

Oh no... could this become the next "Guestbook" for spamming?

Help! My competitor is number 1. I checked his backlinks, and they are all on EBAY!"

[Perplexed]

Sorry, I dont understand the bit about spamming. Can you explain?

[topr8]

ebay seems to allow spidering of individual ebay items

it is against the ebay TOS to have a link out to another site (except in rare circumstances like more specific information regarding the item listing)

additionally here is the robots text for cgi.ebay.com (where the listings reside)

# go away
User-agent: *
Disallow: /

so no page rank help at all

[rcjordan]

>Is short term linking useful?

Yes, absolutely. The first trick is getting it in front of the spider. The second trick is to find a suitable (usually, another temporary) replacement for that mayfly link before that spider comes around again.

[Perplexed]

well that pretty much sums it up topr8. but the ebay links ( which ARE used for further info on sale item ) will still be useful for the extra traffic.