posted on April 13, 2001 05:06:47 PM new
Hiding words in your auction with white letters on a white background is one form of keyword spamming. Another is to include words in your title or auction that don't directly describe or relate to your item. An example would be to throw a bunch of designers names in an auction for a look-alike item. An absolute no-no is to put in your title that the item is "like" a brand name, without being that brand.
One thread on this board a few weeks ago was from a seller who sold attachments for Dremel tools. He had an auction cancelled that used Dremel in the title, cause the attachments were made by someone else. They only fit the Dremel, but that didn't matter. You can generally put this information in the description, but you've got to be careful there.
As far as listing other items that you're selling, its okay to say you've got similar items on sale, or to list some general categories, but a list of 20 other specific auction titles is definitely keyword spamming.
posted on April 14, 2001 08:03:04 AM new
"if I put a link in my auction that says, "Check out my other auctions for Magic Tricks, Jokes, and Pranks", is that Keyword Spamming?"
The decision point for eBay is: does the auction contain words that will make a seller's listings appear when the search is for something OTHER than the listed item.
EXAMPLE: Seller lists several batches of old chocolate molds. They CAN have a link in each of these mentioning that they have several auctions of old chocolate molds. No problem.
HOWEVER, if they also have three Beanie Babies listed, they can't mention Beanie Baby in the chocolate mold auctions nor can they mention the chocolate molds in the BBauction. That's to prevent the chocolate molds from showing up when someone is searching for BBs and vice versa.
ANOTHER EXAMPLE: If you list an autograph of famous person "A", do not mention any other famous persons you might somedaY LIST. One autograph seller had 50-100 auctions showing up EVERY time I looked for Famous person A's autograph ... and none of the auctions were for that autograph, they were just mentioned as "often have available". I reported him, and it became much easier to search.
THIRD EXAMPLE:
Seller of non-brand name widgets lists the famous brands in their auction.
