Making Money with EPN, Amazon Associates and Google Adsense

Enhance your 404 page for EPN and Amazon Associates

December 11, 2009

Often times it is necessary to do some database maintenance, which means deleting old posts. That’s why I use Auction2Post software. Sure you could create your own and automatically make posts but when you start adding duplicate content because you’ve run out of auctions to pull the Big G will not look to kindly on you. There is a great feature in Auction2Post where you can delete all expired auctions with the click of a button. Again, this is why I use their software.

Once you do this maintenance you tend to lose a lot of power with the SERPs because many of the keyword searches will result in your user landing on a 404 page, if your theme is equipped. If it is not, I highly recommend you add a 404.php and add it to your .htaccess file. If you need help, visit the wordpress site and there are a lot of docs to help you.

To combat this issue, I found a piece of code awhile back that really helps. I’m sorry I can’t recall where I got this so if anyone knows the author I’d be happy to include a link back. Basically, when you do a search, there is an identifier in the url string that identifies the keywords that were searched. With this code you’ll be able to figure out which search engine sent the user to you, and the keywords they were searching on. Once you have the keywords, you can then pass them to another script you have that calls either the eBay EPN api, or the Amazon Associates api to return results for the keywords. This will make you, and your visitor happy. They get what they want, and as long as they click, or transact, you get what you want. A Win-Win!

The code:

Good luck and I hope this helps you out. I know it has saved me a few times because when I look in my clicks.txt log, I see a lot of referrers being 404.php.