My objective right now is to try to build some traffic toward the sites I’ve developed so far by getting links. The idea for now is to let them sit and gradually add additional posts and build links.

My goal is to build some of both, plus probably adding PHPBay into the mix as well. Each type has their advantages and disadvantages. I’ll have to go over these in a later post, particularly as I get a better feel for each types performance.

Denise

I’m slowly upping the count on mine, first 10 then 20, etc. to see if it hits a threshold somewhere.

I’ve been doing this for about a month now and started all my blogs with 100 items in the display. Must’ve been by luck or accident I set the blogs up wioth the eBay window in the sidebar - just seemed the easiest way to do it so the display was always there no matter what the posts were about.

So far none of the blogs have been flagged, but I’ll wait for it to happen if you think Blogger are slapping blogs with too many links like the eBay widget generates. For now I’ll leave them as they are and see what happens. Could be interesting…

Having the eBay Sniplet widget certainly seems to be worthwhile if you’re getting search traffic. In some niches, it might outperform Adsense.

A big plus on tech savvy niches is that fewer people ad block it since blocking it also seems to cause parts of eBay to fail as well. I see about 40% blockage on Adsense vs. only about 10% for eBay. While they may block Adsense or affiliates like Commission Junction, they aren’t as likely to cut themselves off from eBay.

Vic warns about using a lot of subdomains since this is a common blackhat tactic that Google doesn’t like, unless you’re a well established site. I know that my niche blogs that I have running as subdomains off of OpTempo don’t get indexed as quickly as WordPress on individual domains or even Blogger blogs. I’d recommend proceeding with caution unless you have a well aged (3 years+), established domain you’re doing this with.

I haven’t tried the eBay RSS feed yet. I used their Sniplet widget since it’s quick and easy to configure and is attractive. On a Blogger blog running the Minima template that makes it the most attractive thing on the page.

Just curious about the blogger blogspot route. I tried the RSS in the sidebar but am not getting the images set in the sidebar. Do I need to install a widget or javascript instead?

Your comment got snagged by Akismet. You may want to check with them to see if you can get your name cleared.

As for the WordPress theme, it’s a pretty easy edit of the stylesheet to do this to most two column themes. Good SEO themes like those that Court has have simple stylesheets and can be modified for width without a lot of trouble. Of course, I may be saying that since I’ve been editing CSS files from time to time for at least 10 years now as part of my work.