No, BANS and phpBay both use similar methods of redirection. It's just designed to make the SE's think the link in internal instead of external and is supposed to get you higher placement in searches. I really don't know if it does or not.

Seems to me that as long as you disclose that all the links go to eBay, no one should care what shows up in the browser's status bar when you hover your mouse over it.

There are two areas I would like some clarification on.

First, this one...

"We have also updated the language in the Network Agreement to make it clear that our partners may not use promotional methods that violate intellectual property or proprietary rights of third party trademarks. This includes, but is not limited to, using a third party trademark (or a term confusingly similar to it) in your URLs."

If you use a WordPress blog and have as your title something like "Canon PowerShot A1100 IS Digital Camera Review" the trademark will be in the URL. This is the name of the page, not the top level domain name or a subdomain name which can have trouble with trademarks. Page names that contain a product name aren't generally considered a trademark problem. Look at any ecommerce site from Amazon on down.

Next, there is this one...

"Publishers may only place links and/or promotional content on sites they own. Affiliate links on third party sites such as Craigslist, MySpace, etc. are not allowed."

As part of my promotional efforts I have blogs on Google's Blogger and a few other third part blogging platforms that allow individual ad placement. While I can understand not allowing links on sites that have a TOS that prohibits this practice, this rule seems to include properties that do allow advertising placement such as Blogger/Blogspot, Squidoo and HubPages.

I don't think ebay has said not to place our own site link somewhere. Since we are the owners of our site it is normally our interest to place it anywhere to get traffic including sign boards on road. If we place our site link on myspace profile or on classified site or in a mail - I don't think they have any problem.
As per their terms, we should not place our ebay rover affiliate link on myspace or classified site or in email even masking it through url shortening sites.
Hope I understood it like that and if any corrections please add it here so that it will help us a lot.

"Third party redirects for the sole purpose of masking a referring URL are no longer allowed."

I take that as having the links come from one site, say a myspace or craigslist, then have it sent through another to mask the referring URL so they can't see it was sent from the myspace or craigslist site.

Since SEO links in PHPBay only mask the link and not the referring URL, it should be OK, but I'd like that to be clarified.

> Since SEO links in PHPBay only mask the link and not the referring URL, it should be OK, but I'd like that to be clarified.

It's not a third party as you yourself are doing the redirect on your own site.

I agree with many of the posts here that these rule changes are somewhat vague. I've no complaint about any changes as it's eBay's game and it's our choice whether to play along. So I'm not posting to complain but I am seeking clarification.

Picking up on the point made earlier about third party sites such as blogger I also ask whether hosted blogs or content on third party sites such as Wordpress, Twitter, Tumblr, Squidoo are allowed as these are not "owned" even if the IP rights of the content are. I appreciate people are offering their own view that these are OK but nobody from ePN has said that yet. If your MySpace or Facebook page isn't allowed then it's not very different from a Squidoo lens or Twitter blog in my view.

Similarly there are several third party article sites that explicitly allow authors to post articles (and retain intellectual ownership) and the ToS allow authors to include links within articles. Again these sites are not "owned" by us even if the IP rights to the articles are.

On the URL shortening. I usually make use of these services for rover links that are as long as a bus. Obviously on my Twitter page I have no choice about using a short url. Therefore it would be useful to have some clarification on this.

I do appreciate ePN want to improve the quality of the referal information they get from affiliate links (as mentioned in July ePN Newsletter). This may explain why they want to reduce the amount of url shortening being used as this often removes referral info. If that is the case will PHP redirection scripts which forward the correct refferal information to eBay be allowed? I use this method to improve SEO and track clicks from articles and third party hosted blogs etc. Again I appreciate some people are guessing ePN is OK with BANS type redirects because they are generated on the same domain but some official confirmation of this would be appreciated.

So could I ask these specific questions in the hope of a pink response please?

1) Can we use affiliate links on third party sites like Blogger, Twitter, Wordpress, Tumblr, Squidoo or article sites where we "own" the IP of the content but not the actual site?

2) Can we shorten/redirect links within our own domain if the intention is to improve SEO (we all know Google's treatment of Rover links), shorten the often very long and cumbersome rover links or carry out our own click tracking?

3) Can we use our own hosted PHP redirects (middle servers) for links we place on sites like Wordpress, Squidoo, Tumblr etc. (assuming we can still use them) if the correct referral information will be forwarded to eBay and, as per existing ToS, it is clear to users they are being taken to eBay when they click these links? I appreciate the email says it is "deliberate masking" that ePN will object to but who can say if an affiliate's desire to track clicks will one day be interpreted as deliberate masking by ePN? Is the use of redirects of rover links to stop potential SEO harm going to be judged as deliberate masking by ePN?

4) Depending if and when clarification is given - and what the decisions are - I can imagine a lot of us may have a huge amount of links to edit in blog posts, articles etc and some (e.g. Twitter) wont ever be editable. Is 1st August going to be enough time to get this all done and will we be punished for overlooked or uneditable historic links that now break the new rules?

Thanks in advance for whatever clarification is forthcoming.

I take it from what I read that brand names are still ok after the 3rd slash? Including the 2 after http:

I have SEO links on my sites but when I check the referrer using the firefox live header extension it shows the referrer as cgi.ebay.com so I would think I'm ok there as well, right?