PhpBay Vs. BANS
A month ago, Mark did a post on reasons to convert a BANS site to PhpBay. I haven’t really discussed PhpBay on my blog, but then again I haven’t really discussed anything on my blog lately. 
For the last few days I’ve been trading emails with Sallie over at Affiliate Marketing Adventure. She was nice enough to give me a heads up on a new product out for one of my niche sites and we got to talking about Wordpress and BANS and PhpBay. I told Sallie that I was looking for someone to convert a few Wordpress themes to Build a Niche Store themes (anybody out there?) and that I was going away from using the Build a Niche Store System completely. I wanted to elaborate on that a bit in this post and give my reasons as to why I have not been building new stores with BANS anymore, but rather relying on PhpBay.
First of all I love the Build a Niche Store system. It is very easy to use and having it setup all those store pages for you is very easy and optimizing for search engines is a snap. The problem now with BANS is that Google hates it. No way around that. Part of the problem is that it’s to easy to create a BANS site with hundreds of pages of eBay products, promise yourself to add content to it later, and then setup another store. That is pretty much a blueprint for a thin affiliate site, and we all know what Google does with those.
The great thing about Wordpress, as I have discussed before, is that Google LOVES Wordpress. Besides that, Wordpress is open source, super easy to install, is easily extendable, and there is a wealth of knowledge available on problems you may encounter with Wordpress.
PhpBay Wordpress Plugin
PhpBay plugs right into Wordpress. It is very easy to install and immediately begin to show your readers targeted eBay products with your EPN number. PhpBay does not automatically create pages of eBay products for you, you insert products into articles or pages yourself.
The way I have been setting up my affiliate sites is by starting a Wordpress blog as the root of the domain name and then adding articles one at a time, sometimes inserting PhpBay commands displaying three products at the bottom of the post. Other times I create an entire page of eBay products right into a static Wordpress page and add content to that. Either way I am building my website one page at a time with plenty of content.
Search engines know that it’s not natural to build a two hundred page website in a day and that is what the Build a Niche Store system can do. A safe way around that problem in BANS is to no-index pages that you have not added unique content to and then do-index afterwards. That can be a lot of work. Another way is to just create BANS pages one page at a time. But that is so much easier to do with Wordpress and PhpBay.
The Build a Niche Store systems backend has lots of features for creating content and inserting targeted eBay products into a page. But Wordpress’ backend is better. In my websites that use both Wordpress and BANS I have to login to two seperate backends when I am working on those sites. With PhpBay I only login to Wordpress and create content and add products right from the admin panel in Wordpress.
I will say that I am still using BANS in sub-directories of some of my niche sites. BANS allows for more flexibility in what products you display to your readers. PhpBay can be limiting because certain rules for what products to be displayed are generalized throughout the site while with BANS you can set many more rules for items to be displayed in individual pages. For example, with PhpBay, the settings page in the plugin handles whether to display the order of the products (most expensive to cheapest, buy it now items only, etc.) and does so sitewide. With BANS you can decide those things in each individual page that you setup.
If someone is starting out new to affiliate marketing I would encourage them to go with the Phpbay method and build niche stores using Wordpress. There are just to many pros for using Wordpress and to many cons to the Build a Niche Store system, mainly Google de-indexing your site.
It’s important to note that the only reason Google dislikes BANS so much is that we abused it by creating so many useless thin affiliate sites.
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Pedro, you’re right that “the only reason Google dislikes BANS so much is that we abused it by creating so many useless thin affiliate sites.” Amazing to see how many thin sites are still out there.
Your post does a good job of explaining differences between phpbay and BANS and making the case for phpbay.
Thanks for the mention!