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Posted at February 13, 2006, 10:32 pm: Removal of Power Seller Status I have been a member of ebay since July of 2001, and an ebay store owner since November, 2004. With a dose of luck and some hard work, I managed to attain the status of Gold Power Seller. But yesterday, February 12th, my power seller status was removed unilaterally by ebay for "site interference". Now let me explain. I am certainly not an HTML guru, but I am moderately proficient. I do all the coding of my listings and accidentally ran across either a bug in ebay's own code, or an inherent weakness of HTML. Last Sunday, February 5, I received a voice mail from ebay's power seller support team. They said that I had some minor violations in my listings (due to a new format I was trying) for keyword spamming and site interference. They said it was nothing to worry about and did not affect my good standing, but suggested that I check my message board for the details. When I returned home, I called the support desk immediately to get a clarification of the problem. To be quite honest, after looking at my cancelled listings and reading ebay's explanation, I didn't have a clue as to the problem. Each time that I called support, I was attended to by a non-technical person, who could not give me specifics about my violations. Fortunately, between his half-answers, and my half-questions, I managed to determine what the problem was in both cases. Not the solution mind you, but at least I understood the offense. The keyword spamming was easy. I am a big fan of cross-marketing in my listings, and due to Ina's most recent book, I had decided to include a few more varied links to my other listings on each ebay page. Now this practice is certainly acceptable, even by ebay. What I didn't know was that it is NOT acceptable to reference another brand name in those links. In other words, I can include a link to any of my other products as long as they are of the same brand as the item being sold. That eliminated the keyword spamming problem. Now on to the good one! The site interference allegation was another story. I was told that my listings were causing changes in ebay's header information. To be exact, some of their borders were widened and their links were of a different color and configuration than they were supposed to be. I could see what they were talking about, but had no idea where to look for the problem and its ultimate correction. After 2 days of searching my HTML code, and eventually pulling out a line at a time and then testing, I found the culprit. Now maybe some of you techies in the audience are aware of this, but it appears that ebay is not, and I certainly wasn't. In my listings I use CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) a lot. This makes it easier for me to go in at a later date and make wholesale changes to the look and feel of my listings. It turns out that the definitions for some page attributes in MY code was overriding ebay's programming. I have yet to find out whether this is a bug in their code, or an inherent problem with HTML. To be more exact, on my pages I was defining some characteristics for the attribute, the one that controls what a link looks like (color, underlined or not, what happens when a user holds his mouse over it, etc.). Because of my code, all the links in ebay's header for each of my pages, was displaying my link characteristics rather than theirs. I certainly thought that I should be able to use any HTML in my listings without having to worry about what might affect ebay's header. Apparently, I was wrong. As I said above, my power seller status was removed yesterday. No advance warning, no discussion. When I called to find out why, they told me that "site interference" is a serious matter and carries an automatic removal of power seller status. Does anyone else out there have any experience with this? I can't believe that I am the only person to accidentally override ebay's header. I have appealed my removal but have not heard back from them, and quite frankly, don't expect to. Original of the message was taken from http://www.auctionbytes.com/forum/phpBB/ Replies:Thats definately a strange occurence.Well, Ebay has a rather wide variety of HTML. Don't worry about your PowerSeller status. I've seen lots of people using style sheets and manipulative HTML with... That's why I approach Ebay like defensive driving I didn't have my status removed, but they did warn me about a similar ... eBay is getting better about taking smaller steps before the big suspe... Why would anyone want to post nazi stuff? Hank, I'm sorry if my previous post was not clear. 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