The BANS Experiment: Site Build Update
Well it's been two weeks now since I decided to build a new BANS site to answer the question 'Is BANS really Dead?' because a lot of people have been asking it. So I just wanted to write a short post to let you know how I've been getting on.
So far I haven't been able to progress as far as I would have liked because of one distraction or another, however this weekend I have really made good progress with the site and it's starting to take shape and look the way I want it to. Below I have detailed exactly what I have done to the site so far:
BANS Site Build: Week 1 Update
Around three days after I made my first post announcing that I was going to build a new BANS website I decided to register a completely new domain name rather than one which I had lying around, my reason for this was so that I had a domain name with no traffic and which wasn't indexed. So on the 23rd of June I registered my new domain name, the name is a one word .com domain name just six letters long and fits perfectly with my chosen niche. Now, the domain name is not something I am going to reveal during this build and the reason for that is it will affect my results, which I don't want, by skewing the traffic statistics so for that reason the site will be kept private for the moment.
After I had my domain name registered the next step was to install a copy of the Build A Niche Store V3.0 script. It's been a long while since I have done this and I had forgotten how quick and easy it is to get your store up and running in a couple of minutes, a big part of the reason why so many people failed in the past with BANS.
Removing the BANS 'Footprint'
Once BANS was installed I set it up and configured all of my settings and then I got to work on the important part, removing the BANS footprint. The main things I did to do this are:
1) Built a custom template to match my chosen niche and to look less like a standard BANS site
2) Removed the 'Powered by Build A Niche Store' link within the footer of the site
3) Changed the sidebar names of 'Page Navigation' and 'Store Navigation' to something completely different
4) Switched off the 'Sort by' menu
5) Removed the 'View more items' link underneath product listings
6) Switched off pagination across the site
7) Switched off the eBay image above all listings
8) Set product listings to display only titles, images and prices, switching off bids, Paypal image and times
9) Renamed the path to my admin area from /admin to something different for improved security
Ensuring a Quality Site Build
As I mentioned above there were and are a lot of people who slap BANS sites together with very little care or attention, they try to mimic eBay directly by building stores which simply contain pages and pages of nothing but eBay listings. I can tell you now that regardless of how well BANS performs or doesn't perform, a store with nothing but eBay listings is not going to get you anywhere and if your site is indexed you are on a hiding to being de-indexed. For this reason I will be building a quality site which offers 'value' to visitors in the way of content and information in the form of guides, product reviews and other additional relevant content related to my niche. I will obviously be displaying eBay listings but these listings will be an addition to my site rather than a necessity, in other words if I didn't display eBay listings on the site then it would still get traffic and still remain indexed.
So overall these are the things I will be doing to ensure I don't end up with an 'out of the box' BANS website:
1) Built a custom template (as mentioned above)
2) Applied several tweaks and settings (as mentioned above)
3) Produced handwritten, unique content in the form of reviews, guides, recipes and product information
4) Set a maximum of only six listings per page and all listings are tightly focused to return only the item related to it's respective product page.
5) No home page products will be displayed, instead there will be short excerpts to our top rated product pages with a reasonable amount of keyword optimized content.
Traffic & Indexing Information
When I bought the domain name it had an Alexa ranking of 17,669,559, wasn't indexed and had no traffic. At present I am still working on the site and have done NO promotion or search engine submissions.
The Current Alexa ranking of the site is just over 3,000,000. The site is indexed in all the major search engines, specifically Google, Yahoo and Bing, and in addition it has all current 12 pages indexed.
Over the next week I will be adding my 40+ pages of content, each will be around 300 words in length and I will be SEOing each page of the site for my chosen primary and secondary keywords for each respective page, then into the 4th week I'll start to promote the site.
Even though it's very early days and we are only two weeks into the build everything is looking promising. I'll keep you updated of how things come along with the site over the next couple of weeks, hopefully within the first month I can get the site to make a sale.
Similar Posts Which May Be Of Interest:
- The BANS Experiment: Site Build Update 2
- Is BANS Really Dead? Lets Experiment!
- The New BANS Guide: My Review
- Starting Your phpBay Site Build
- Professional WordPress BANS Template
seo California (1)
Good luck, Ben, you have certainly put some work into it. Hope it pans out okay for you. Lookf orward to reading the updates.
Enjoy the journey.
Mandy
This wil be interesting! I got a feeling BANS was dead, especially when I got their latest newsletter update. Prove me wrong!
@Mandy –
Thanks Mandy, I am hoping it goes well, I am sure there is still life in BANS yet.
@Daisy –
You may be surprised, my site is currently getting well indexed by the search engines and starting to see a little traffic, I am still in the process of adding content pages but should have it all done and ready to promote fully over the next couple of days, then we will see if BANS still has it.
Ben
I am curious to see how your site looks. I went and found 9 of the Golf sites that Kevin and Adam put together with BANS. (I like the template they use in the samples.) The golf sites I found by them all looked the same but were different niches in the Golf market. I also found that 4 of the sites were de-indexed or in the process of being de-indexed from G. It sucks when you put a lot of work into something and it gets removed from G – Go Bing. It’s difficult trying to figure out how and why they get de-indexed – doesn’t seem like any logic because some make it and some don’t. If it’s BANS, which it may not be, I’m looking at going straight WP or WP/Bans on backend.
By the way, where do you do your hosting. I use a dedicated server at Godaddy, but looking to try Cpanel at another host. I wouldn’t mind using Hostgator with a shared ip plan, but I don’t like some of the IP Neighborhoods.