advertising site on ebay

[shenbo]

Hi There,

I am a seller on ebay and also own a website. I started advertising my site with my lists on ebay. Here is what I do:

1. In the description of each item I list on ebay, there is a link to the site map of my website.

2. All pictures of the item in the ebay description are hosted in my website.

3. Each picture contains a link to a page (within my website) which has a bigger picture and a header image linking back to my site map.

By doing so, I have a lot of links to my site map from within my website and from my ebay list pages.

Will it be penalized by Google or other search engines?

Thanks a lot.

Bo

[dirkz]

Shenbo, welcome to WebmasterWorld!

Your pages won't be penalized. Ebay has lots of pages that don't link to yours and ebay also links to lots of other pages.

They will be ignored in the worst case (are they raw links or redirects?).

Btw, maybe you should make sure by looking at other sellers' pages who do the same.

[DaveN]

don't hotlink to you images it's just a bandwidth drain, unless you are using them as page counters as well ;)

are the links for ebay showing up as backlinks?

DaveN

[shenbo]

dirkz & DaveN, thanks for the reply. All my links are raw links. I don't have any links in my pages linking back to ebay, only a javascript (history.go(-1)) to return to previous page, my ebay item description page.

DaveN, could you explain what hotlink is? I don't know if I have that or not.

[ogletree]

I never thought of that. Do auctions get indexed in Google. Could you use Ebay as a place for Anchor Text and PR.

[DaveN]

hot linking when you link to an image not on your server.

or someone else links to an image on your site and displays it on their site without hosting it

DaveN

[vitaplease]

related:

[webmasterworld.com...]

[Iguana]

So Shenbo - to summarise what vitaplease's thread reveals:

No you won't be penalised by Google or any other search engines because the listings pages are not indexed due to ebay banning them in their robots.txt

[birdstuff]

You should be fine with Google. But you may not be with Ebay. Ebay has strict rules against linking to your website from an auction with very limited exceptions. One exception is to provide additional information about the item in the Ebay listing, such as a FAQ page or manufacture's spec page.

I don't think they allow hot links to an unrelated web page at all (and a site map would almost certainly be considered unrelated). And that applies to graphic links (images) as well as text links.

I do think that you can link to your website from your "me" page if you have one set up on Ebay.

Maybe someone else can clarify some of this. I would hate to see your auction listings get killed by Ebay, or even worse, get your Ebay account terminated.

[Jenstar]

eBay stores get indexed, but not the actual auctions themselves, so you won't benefit or be hurt from links within the auctions.

If that site map would take users to a page where they could purchase your auctioned widget (especially if it could be purchased for less than the bid price), eBay could end your auction (because people could buy it through your site, and not through the auction, thus eBay losing their commission).

[werty]

In the "me"/"about me" page you can add links or HTML.

They are indexed by google and some even have PR, but I think you may require an outside link to get to them. So if you have a store that also sells on ebay I would have your "about me" section either list the current auctions and link to it from your real store that says "check out our ebay auctions".

[PatrickDeese]

I have found that linking to a page with more info about a product, that happens to list other related products is not only acceptable to eBay's terms, also frequently results in additional sales.

[shenbo]

so I won't worry about being penalized by Google any more. Thanks everyone for the messages.

I will see if other sellers have done the same thing on ebay, just to be safe.