TulipTools Internet Business Owners and Online Sellers Community

I noticed two weeks ago that links to individual stores were droping. Now it seems to have plained out.

I was using yahoo search and searching {link: and eBay store home page short URL.}

For stores that had a google page rank of 3 or 4 out of 10, on yahoo would turn up well over 1,000 links to a store home page. Doing this now for well marketed stores will turm up about 100 to 250 links on yahoo. The eBay store home page short URL does not come up in these links anywhere now.

Is eBay blocking outside search for stores? Will this be an attempt to force everyone to use yahoo paid search or yahoo search marketing?

store referal credit: your store short URL ?refid=store

You can not find this in yahoo search either

search just the eBay short home page URL and you will find a hand full of pages that have that URL in them, but the URL page does not come up.

Tell me I'm seeing this wrong.

No Yahoo is maybe not really wanting to play nice w ebay.
Perhaps they are getting ready to do a hostile take over. 

Quote:Is eBay blocking outside search for stores?

The only thing eBay is blocking access to in their robots.txt file is the pages on policies and trust and safety because eBay doesn't want them cached by search engines.  It's much easier to make changes to policies without notifying users when search engines are blocked from the policy pages.

Quote:### BEGIN FILE ###
#
# allow-all
#
#
# The use of robots or other automated means to access the eBay site
# without the express permission of eBay is strictly prohibited.
# Notwithstanding the foregoing, eBay may permit automated access to
# access certain eBay pages but soley for the limited purpose of
# including content in publicly available search engines. Any other
# use of robots or failure to obey the robots exclusion standards set
# forth at is strictly
# prohibited.
# v3
#

User-agent: *
Disallow: /help/confidence/
Disallow: /help/policies/
Disallow: /disney/

### END FILE ###

http://stores.ebay.com/robots.txt

Quote:store referal credit: your store short URL ?refid=store

You can not find this in yahoo search either

Yahoo has been cracking down on affiliate links in its index.  To me, and probably Yahoo too, that looks like an affiliate link since the actual URL of the web page doesn't contain a refid.

Okay, if nobody else can see a drop in links on yahoo to any eBay store, I guess it is nothing.

Thank you for your time