13 ms·

Panda 4.0: Why eBay lost many of its organic rankings

168 points by gere 12y ago

Cthulhu_ 12y ago
TBH, it seems like eBay just hasn't moved along with the times; as the article points out, their landing pages have very little content and a ton of old-fashioned 'SEO techinques' with keywords and internal links pointing everywhere. They now have a reason to rework their website, improve sales listings with the user in mind, clean up their pages and make them nice and lean, etc. I hope Amazon gets the same treatment, their product pages are a mess too IMO.
- DanBC 12y ago
  I would much rather Amazon spend sometime fixing their terrible terrible search.
  - otisfunkmeyer 12y ago
    Not to derail this comment section too much but your comment made me realize how much I too find Amazon's search to be terrible terrible. It's especially strange considering that Bezos has such an almost pathological (not necessarily in the bad sense) focus on the customer. One would think Amazon would have some of the best, most laser-focused search of any site on the Internet, but I can't even reliably use 4-stars-and-up as a search filter, or even "Prime only." No matter what I do, I get shown things outside of the filter I set up. It's downright bizarre. Again, my apologies for the little thread hijacking. I guess one could at least argue it's "search-related" lol....
    - GavinB 12y ago
      It's possible that Amazon's analytics demonstrate that you're more likely to purchase if shown a wider variety of products, even if you attempted to narrow it down. Not that their short term bottom line is a worthy excuse for deceptive and confusing search practices.
    - dingaling 12y ago
      Amazon's request that I 'Choose a department to enable sorting' of search results is an abomination. How am I meant to know how they have categorised something? Should I look in Cameras & Electronics for an SD card or Memory? Or one of the other 24 Departments they suggest? How can they NOT have fixed this after 20 years?
      - dragonwriter 12y ago
        > How can they NOT have fixed this after 20 years? Maybe because they are dominating internet retailing so much that they don't feel any need to, largely through low prices achieved through (1) narrow margins, and (2) not doing anything that isn't aimed at reducing long term costs per sale. You think it sucks, I think it sucks -- but if empirically its working good enough and fixing it is a cost without a clear payoff for them, why do it?
        ma2rten 12y ago
        Less friction always leads to better conversion. Amazon knows that, that is why they have one click orders. Improving their search would mean that more people find what they want to buy. That means more sales, PERIOD.
        dragonwriter 12y ago
        > Improving their search would mean that more people find what they want to buy. Sure, improving their search would mean that more people find what they were initially planning to buy without seeing as much other stuff. Of course, offline retail experience has been that that's generally a good thing for premium venues, its usually exactly the exact opposite of what is good for sales in discount venues. And, even to the extent that it might be a net gain -- I suspect it would, overall -- its quite easy to believe it might not (despite 20 years) have ever reached the level of being the lowest-hanging fruit in terms of benefit/cost ratio.
      - DanBC 12y ago
        See also Ebay, where sorting SD cards by price gives you people selling you an adapter for 0.99 or a card for 8.99, which pushes that listing into the 0.99 end of the list. (Yes, I am aware that searching ebay for the cheapest sd cards is foolish!)
  - makomk 12y ago
    For that matter, I'd quite like it if eBay unfixed their search so that when I searched "worldwide" it did actually find all items worldwide that shipped to my country, rather than some random subset of them.
  - Consultant32452 12y ago
    Before Google started charging for its "Shopping" results you could use Google to effectively search ebay. Now, not so much.
  - frik 12y ago
    On Amazon.de you can sort the search results by: Best result | popularity | cost: ascending | user rating | date On Amazon.com this feature is missing! Why? Btw. the technology: A9.com is a subsidiary of Amazon.com based in Palo Alto, California that develops search and advertising technology: is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A9.com http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A9.com
- nullc 12y ago
  Whats the deal with ebay? To me seems like the site hasn't improved in a decade, even simple and seemingly common features like search are buggy— e.g. go save a search with a price restriction and set it to email you: It emails without heeding the price limits.
  - chris_wot 12y ago
    In a word: management. They seem to have made a lot of missteps, and are squandering their reputation and resting on their laurels. They upset their small vendors, tried to lock in payments to Paypal, charge large fees, have a terrible SEO strategy and an appallingly designed website. I'm seriously confused why so many people still use them!
    - mreiland 12y ago
      Last time I used them was years ago, and I got scammed for it, although that actually isn't the reason I stopped using them. It's because Amazon is just better, and they're up in my face about PayPal.
leephillips 12y ago
I don't usually enjoy articles in the SEO category, but I skimmed this out of idle curiosity and was rewarded by the amusing example showing how ebay paid for ads saying Vomit Sale! New and used vomit! Check out the deals now!
- Houshalter 12y ago
  Does that count as false advertising? Can you just say "I am selling X on my site" even if you aren't?
  - davidw 12y ago
    They do sell "vomit" though: http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_trksid=p2050601.m570.l1313.TR0.TRC0.H0.Xvomit&_nkw=vomit&_sacat=0&_from=R40 http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_trksid=p2050601.m570.l1313.T...
    - bhartzer 12y ago
      Yes, but they sell plenty of fake vomit: http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_trksid=p2050601.m570.l1313.TR0.TRC0.H0.Xfake+vomit&_nkw=fake+vomit&_sacat=0&_from=R40 http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_trksid=p2050601.m570.l1313.T...
- hagbardgroup 12y ago
  They're using dynamic keywords in the worst possible way. Often times the landing pages will be empty, junk, or misleading. What that means is that they will form an ad around your query targeted to a particular page on eBay, often times insensitive to the existing inventory or improperly matched. Compare this to Amazon's dynamic keyword campaigns, which usually only trigger when they have relevant inventory, and match to a dynamically generated page that does its best to match the inventory results to the query. This is not easy to do, but not impossible, either. eBay looks to just set up their dynamic campaigns and scream #yolo. This is the best article written about their terribleness: http://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2013/03/13/dear-ebay-its-not-adwords-its-you http://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2013/03/13/dear-ebay-its-n...
adventured 12y ago
Mostly I'm curious to see what kind of bottom-line impact Google is capable of inflicting upon eBay, given eBay's immense scale. Just how dependent upon Google organic traffic are they at this point. Nothing will rev up regulator interest like a $65 billion company willing to cry to D.C. as they lose a billion in sales due to algorithm changes.
bhouston 12y ago
It is a bit weird that "Harvard Business Review predicted that Amazon, Walgreens and other major internet retailers would soon follow eBay's lead and ditch AdWords. If you’re doing SEO, you get that prime SERP placement for free, right?" And then shortly there after eBay dropped significantly in Google's rankings. To be honest, the above statement from HBR is a major threat to Google's business. Coincidence?
- phpnode 12y ago
  > Coincidence? yes.
  - bhouston 12y ago
    eBay was likely one of the largest AdWord buyers. They seemed to have spamming landing pages in Google for a long time but were never penalized. They stopped being a huge AdWord buyer. Soon after they were penalized in Google's search engine rankings. Coincidence? When there is that much money involved, and a possible exodus of Wallgreens and Amazon away from Adwords, I am not completely buying it. Google would be stupid to allow that to occur.
    - bryanlarsen 12y ago
      When we make our product better, we are also frequently rewarded with increased revenue.
  - matthewmacleod 12y ago
    This. Can't be said enough. There's almost certainly not a concerted effort in Google to de-rank eBay, and you'd immediately hear it leak from one of the many people who would have to be involved if there were.
    - bhouston 12y ago
      It doesn't have to specifically target eBay to have the effect one wants. One just has to go after characteristics of spamminess that they didn't prioritize before. Like i said in another post, eBay has been spammy for a while, but it was not penalized. eBay and Amazon are huge spenders on Adwords according to this infochart (which may or may not be reliable): http://i.i.cbsi.com/cnwk.1d/i/tim/2012/01/24/google-earnings.png http://i.i.cbsi.com/cnwk.1d/i/tim/2012/01/24/google-earnings...
coldpie 12y ago
I've been using ebay once or twice a year for over a decade, and I've noticed their product pages are almost worthless these days. Almost the entire first scroll-page is filled with the bidding and shipping info and ads. For media like video games, there's another page of default info for the game which is identical on every single page for that game. I already know what I'm buying, you don't need to tell me the ESRB score. Then there's usually one or two lines of description from the seller. Then another page of ads and another page of the eBay footer. And this description is with AdBlock enabled! Content I want? Current price, shipping price, and the description from the seller. Everything else is garbage. The default pictures and descriptions are especially worthless. I want pictures of the actual product I'm buying, not whatever marketing shot of a pristine product from the company.
- t0lk 12y ago
  And the seller rating. I think a big selling point for Amazon is that all sellers are grouped by product and it becomes very easy to choose the best one. I'm never going to want to sort through 20 listings of the same product and I just don't see how eBay can overcome that fundamental problem. That, and as a seller I hate getting taxed twice for one sale.
Gracana 12y ago
"Dynamic Keyword Insertion" So that's what that awful misfeature is called. I hate those ads, they're always frustratingly unhelpful.
- bowlofpetunias 12y ago
  This is the primary reason why I also block text ads.
  - ejk314 12y ago
    I see why you do, but that's such a shame. DKI a damn useful feature that could help both customers and businesses, but it's 'exploited' in a way that doesn't even help the people who are destroying it.
    - Kiro 12y ago
      Help how?
      - mathewsimonton 12y ago
        When used appropriately by the business it could alert the consumer of a relevant product/service and hopefully a special deal. This helps the consumer easily find the product/service and possibly save money. It also helps the business nab a sale they weren't necessarily organically ranking well for.
- timje1 12y ago
  Yep, it's extremely frustrating to find that a google search result that claims to contain what you've asked for, only to click through and find a search page with the following: 'No results for "what you just searched for" found here'
- timdierks 12y ago
  They're not so bad when they're not broken; a lot of the time, you can't even tell that an ad is using them, because it's natural and appropriate. Here's the (best) use case: let's say I sell garden equipment: hoses, sprinklers, garden gnomes, etc., so I advertise on those terms as keywords. I could have one ad that says "Best Garden Equipment", but tests show that ads work better if they specifically name the product that the user is looking for. So I can use keyword expansion to have the ad say "Best Garden Hoses", "Best Garden Sprinklers", "Best Garden Gnomes", etc., and not have to manage a lot of different ads. This can be used in much broader cases, too, such as if I have hotels in 500 US cities: load up the keyword expansion with the names of all 500 cities and run an ad with title "{CITY_NAME} Hotel Rooms". The problem is when people load it up with a jillion keywords in the hope that, if they get a click, they'll look for matches in their product database afterwards, and sometimes they fail. So, yes: frequently lame. But when it's not misused, pretty useful.
jqm 12y ago
I buy from eBay from time to time in spite of the fact I'm not completely crazy about them and wish they were better at what they do. At the moment, for better or worse, they seem to have the most sellers of the type I sometimes look for. That being said, as a Google search user I am delighted to see them lose search ranking. Is sucks seeing eBay listed in first page search results for just about everything. If I wanted to look for an item on eBay I would go to eBay. What I want is INFORMATION about the item/topic, not a link to eBay. Now, if they could just get ehow and about.com.....
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
strict9 12y ago
It's too bad sites aren't also penalized for fixed-position social share widgets that make reading on mobile impossible, like wordsteam does.
- Donzo 12y ago
  Yes, also full page overlays. Everytime one of these loads, I press back just on principle.
- sokoloff 12y ago
  They are indirectly penalized for it. Bounce rate is a factor in google's organic search algorithm. If a lot of users click-through a given search result, find a bad experience, google has incentive (and makes an effort) to penalize those results.
  - ForHackernews 12y ago
    Wait, how can google measure that? Do they have a tracker that sees when I leave a site?
    - sokoloff 12y ago
      They get direct data on click-back. (Search, click, come back to google after a very short time, is a fair signal, in aggregate, that the users don't like that site's search results or other experience factor.) I don't believe they directly have bounce data, but they infer it from click-back. They have publicly stated that they do NOT use google analytics data to inform organic search rankings.
bowlofpetunias 12y ago
Wasn't eBay pretty much buried by Google for a while now? It's been ages since I've seen useless eBay results when searching for stuff like info on particular consumer products.
- swalsh 12y ago
  Not completely, recently I was in the market for some very specific pull handles for a dresser that i'm building. When I googled it, 2 websites selling very expensive recreations came up, and 1 ebay auction selling a modestly priced antique version, and an etsy store. Actually, the ebay link was quite useful to me to be honest.
- drzaiusapelord 12y ago
  and for good reason. I don't need to be linked to a scammy or expired auction from ebay when I'm searching for a retail product or review. Can you imagine going to Target or Best Buy and having some guy with a megaphone screeching at everyone about his used wares in the back of his van in the parking lot?
po 12y ago
Wait, are they buying AdWords and then putting Google Ads on the pages that people land on? Does that make any sense? Does Google pay out for those impressions?
- jacquesm 12y ago
  This practice is called arbitrage and can actually make money. I know a few people that live of this. It's against the TOS of almost any ad serving company but that doesn't mean it does not happen. (which is interesting, because you'd think it would be very easy to detect, and yet, people do it): https://support.google.com/adwordspolicy/answer/190442?hl=en https://support.google.com/adwordspolicy/answer/190442?hl=en What's interesting here is that you could argue that if you bought the traffic from party 'A' and sold it to party 'B' you should be free to do so. The only reason Google can (and does) put a stop to this is because they see both sides of the trades and your take is technically their loss. But people buying traffic on adsense or another source of traffic that is cheaper than the one where they are selling it could likely pull this sort of thing for years.
  - vdaniuk 12y ago
    You are actually only somewhat right. While arbitrage is forbidden, placing AdWords ads on the pages that have value and purpose other than serving ads and simultaneously buying AdWords traffic is legitimate.
    - jacquesm 12y ago
      Then you're asking for trouble. Some google flunkey will have to determine what 'value' is, come down on the wrong side of your imaginary line and boom gone is your adsense account. It's a risk some are willing to take but I would be very careful with that strategy, especially if the pages are used in this combination right from day 1.
    - ChuckMcM 12y ago
      Jacques is correct here, if the ads on the landing page are substantially similar to the ad word buy then Google will penalize you. So if you buy and Ad for 'hair dryer' and you have a page which says "a hair dryer drys your hair." and a bunch more AdSense ads around it for buying a hair dryer from different vendors, that will eventually get you in trouble. It is however "ok" to buy an adword to a page about, say a '65 mustang restoration article you did. Have it be mostly an article about restoring a mustang and a "few" (for some opaque definition of a few) AdSense ads on the page which may or may not be related to the AdWords buy. But what is really the bottom line is that the variations are endless :-)
dcc1 12y ago
Thanks to Shitpal I have switched my shopping to Amazon. Ebay/Paypal deserve to die out.
perlpimp 12y ago
Does this mean that some sites will get a rise of Panda 4.0 deployment? And more interesting kind of sites will be get the rise out deployment of Panda 4.0. my 2c
- jonknee 12y ago
  Yes, in this case everyone who was under eBay on SERPs has gotten a rise. Every change makes winners and losers.
dabit3 12y ago
Ebay & Paypal are the worst companies I have ever had the displeasure of doing business with.
- booruguru 12y ago
  Well Paypal is owned by eBay so really it's just one really big, awful corporation.
lazyant 12y ago
With all the products eBay moves and so many users it shouldn't be difficult for eBay to reward in some way (less paypal fees, more prominent listings etc) users for writing reviews of products, creating cheap and reasonably good content. But I mean, if they buy ads for "By X" where X is any search term...
robryan 12y ago
Regarding eBay using Product Listing Ads, they already do this heavily, often to the point of being unfair (listing the same product say 5 times for 5 separate sellers on ebay) I think it will just hurt incremental sales, rather than them being able to make up the shortfall on Google via paid means.
willu 12y ago
This is basically the BloomReach approach to SEO and Google seems to be going after it in a serious way lately. The big issue is quality control. I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing to create these sorts of landing pages if they surface highly relevant results. Google's product search is not comprehensive or sophisticated enough yet to be useful for the common shopper so it's a mistake to penalize highly refined results with no good replacement.
- dangrossman 12y ago
  It's a shame that Google cares more about propping up ad click numbers for quarterlies than actually solving product search. They surely have the talent, data and traffic incentives for stores to do a much better job at it than anyone else. Instead, they went paid-only a while back, so Google's Shopping results are nothing but ads from the limited number of stores willing to upload a product list and pay for anything that gets clicked.
- btown 12y ago
  I worry (for BloomReach's sake) that Google will be unable to distinguish algorithmically between search-powered landing pages like eBay's, which (as mentioned in the article) are barely-usable collections of links designed specifically for SEO, and BloomReach-like auto-generated landing pages that are, quite literally, optimized for consumer usability. Just because a page is auto-generated and not curated doesn't make it spam. What makes something spam is that users treat it like spam, consider it spam. But unless Google's using (abusing?) its analytics cookies to track users on sites and see whether they treat an autogenerated page like linkspam or like a content page, they'd have no way of making that decision.
whoismua 12y ago
"The implication of this report was that eBay was going to drop AdWords as a channel and focus its efforts on organic search engine optimization. So how did that work out for them?" Hmmm.....just hmmm.... I do not buy that Google Search is not doing Google Adword's bidding, directly or indirectly. They know why advertises and who doesn't, by name and by category ("large brands" for example. ) So unless Google is separated in two separately owned parts (Search and Ads) I think people have every reason to question this. Especially since a drop in traffic essentially forces a site to buy ads. the same goes for Android and Chrome, many of their features are to drive people to Google search.
d23 12y ago
On a sidenote, did anyone else notice the popup that only appears once you're going to close the page? I've tried to re-create it, but it actually appears to be pretty intelligent. I was initially annoyed, since that's the standard reaction, but then I realized it didn't block my reading of the article at all, since I was attempting to leave anyway. Kind of cool.
- thatthatis 12y ago
  I saw those for the first time yesterday. Apparently some asshat has a patent on displaying an interstitial when the mouse moves above a certain x coordinate dressed up as "measuring exit intent"
  - frankdenbow 12y ago
    In this case it was BounceExchange, but others like Exit Monitor & Picreel do the same thing. Its popular on e-commerce sites where you have a funnel for converting vistors to paid customers.
    - thatthatis 12y ago
      Yep, that's them. Bounce exchange is the one that has the garbage patent.
  - noir_lord 12y ago
    This one hurts my head. They have a patent on moving the mouse cursor towards the address bar?!.
iblaine 12y ago
This reminds me that there was a time when eBay had no organic search traffic. A few pages were indexed. About the same time eBay launched their API. An enterprising college student created a site from ebays API. Normally this wouldn't have been a big deal but the new site had static pages, easy for googlebots to crawl & pages with affiliate links. The site went from generating a few hundred dollars per month in affiliate commissions to millions. eBay clearly didn't care about SEO back then so it's a bit ironic to read this today.
jwblackwell 12y ago
Auction pages don't really belong in search results. IMO. I think they had this coming.
cordite 12y ago
I hope #2 or #3 spot sites that only come up with a search page to other search engines that produce 0 relevant results die with this. Stack Overflow is usually at the top, but when I want relevant blog entries that actually cover what I'm working with, those get shoved to the back.

168 points by gere 12y ago

TBH, it seems like eBay just hasn't moved along with the times; as the article points out, their landing pages have very little content and a ton of old-fashioned 'SEO techinques' with keywords and internal links pointing everywhere. They now have a reason to rework their website, improve sales listings with the user in mind, clean up their pages and make them nice and lean, etc. I hope Amazon gets the same treatment, their product pages are a mess too IMO.

DanBC 12y ago
I would much rather Amazon spend sometime fixing their terrible terrible search.
- otisfunkmeyer 12y ago
  Not to derail this comment section too much but your comment made me realize how much I too find Amazon's search to be terrible terrible. It's especially strange considering that Bezos has such an almost pathological (not necessarily in the bad sense) focus on the customer. One would think Amazon would have some of the best, most laser-focused search of any site on the Internet, but I can't even reliably use 4-stars-and-up as a search filter, or even "Prime only." No matter what I do, I get shown things outside of the filter I set up. It's downright bizarre. Again, my apologies for the little thread hijacking. I guess one could at least argue it's "search-related" lol....
  - GavinB 12y ago
    It's possible that Amazon's analytics demonstrate that you're more likely to purchase if shown a wider variety of products, even if you attempted to narrow it down. Not that their short term bottom line is a worthy excuse for deceptive and confusing search practices.
  - dingaling 12y ago
    Amazon's request that I 'Choose a department to enable sorting' of search results is an abomination. How am I meant to know how they have categorised something? Should I look in Cameras & Electronics for an SD card or Memory? Or one of the other 24 Departments they suggest? How can they NOT have fixed this after 20 years?
    - dragonwriter 12y ago
      > How can they NOT have fixed this after 20 years? Maybe because they are dominating internet retailing so much that they don't feel any need to, largely through low prices achieved through (1) narrow margins, and (2) not doing anything that isn't aimed at reducing long term costs per sale. You think it sucks, I think it sucks -- but if empirically its working good enough and fixing it is a cost without a clear payoff for them, why do it?
      - ma2rten 12y ago
        Less friction always leads to better conversion. Amazon knows that, that is why they have one click orders. Improving their search would mean that more people find what they want to buy. That means more sales, PERIOD.
        dragonwriter 12y ago
        > Improving their search would mean that more people find what they want to buy. Sure, improving their search would mean that more people find what they were initially planning to buy without seeing as much other stuff. Of course, offline retail experience has been that that's generally a good thing for premium venues, its usually exactly the exact opposite of what is good for sales in discount venues. And, even to the extent that it might be a net gain -- I suspect it would, overall -- its quite easy to believe it might not (despite 20 years) have ever reached the level of being the lowest-hanging fruit in terms of benefit/cost ratio.
    - DanBC 12y ago
      See also Ebay, where sorting SD cards by price gives you people selling you an adapter for 0.99 or a card for 8.99, which pushes that listing into the 0.99 end of the list. (Yes, I am aware that searching ebay for the cheapest sd cards is foolish!)
- makomk 12y ago
  For that matter, I'd quite like it if eBay unfixed their search so that when I searched "worldwide" it did actually find all items worldwide that shipped to my country, rather than some random subset of them.
- Consultant32452 12y ago
  Before Google started charging for its "Shopping" results you could use Google to effectively search ebay. Now, not so much.
- frik 12y ago
  On Amazon.de you can sort the search results by: Best result | popularity | cost: ascending | user rating | date On Amazon.com this feature is missing! Why? Btw. the technology: A9.com is a subsidiary of Amazon.com based in Palo Alto, California that develops search and advertising technology: is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A9.com http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A9.com
nullc 12y ago
Whats the deal with ebay? To me seems like the site hasn't improved in a decade, even simple and seemingly common features like search are buggy— e.g. go save a search with a price restriction and set it to email you: It emails without heeding the price limits.
- chris_wot 12y ago
  In a word: management. They seem to have made a lot of missteps, and are squandering their reputation and resting on their laurels. They upset their small vendors, tried to lock in payments to Paypal, charge large fees, have a terrible SEO strategy and an appallingly designed website. I'm seriously confused why so many people still use them!
  - mreiland 12y ago
    Last time I used them was years ago, and I got scammed for it, although that actually isn't the reason I stopped using them. It's because Amazon is just better, and they're up in my face about PayPal.

leephillips 12y ago

I don't usually enjoy articles in the SEO category, but I skimmed this out of idle curiosity and was rewarded by the amusing example showing how ebay paid for ads saying Vomit Sale! New and used vomit! Check out the deals now!

Houshalter 12y ago
Does that count as false advertising? Can you just say "I am selling X on my site" even if you aren't?
- davidw 12y ago
  They do sell "vomit" though: http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_trksid=p2050601.m570.l1313.TR0.TRC0.H0.Xvomit&_nkw=vomit&_sacat=0&_from=R40 http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_trksid=p2050601.m570.l1313.T...
  - bhartzer 12y ago
    Yes, but they sell plenty of fake vomit: http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_trksid=p2050601.m570.l1313.TR0.TRC0.H0.Xfake+vomit&_nkw=fake+vomit&_sacat=0&_from=R40 http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_trksid=p2050601.m570.l1313.T...
hagbardgroup 12y ago
They're using dynamic keywords in the worst possible way. Often times the landing pages will be empty, junk, or misleading. What that means is that they will form an ad around your query targeted to a particular page on eBay, often times insensitive to the existing inventory or improperly matched. Compare this to Amazon's dynamic keyword campaigns, which usually only trigger when they have relevant inventory, and match to a dynamically generated page that does its best to match the inventory results to the query. This is not easy to do, but not impossible, either. eBay looks to just set up their dynamic campaigns and scream #yolo. This is the best article written about their terribleness: http://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2013/03/13/dear-ebay-its-not-adwords-its-you http://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2013/03/13/dear-ebay-its-n...

adventured 12y ago

Mostly I'm curious to see what kind of bottom-line impact Google is capable of inflicting upon eBay, given eBay's immense scale. Just how dependent upon Google organic traffic are they at this point. Nothing will rev up regulator interest like a $65 billion company willing to cry to D.C. as they lose a billion in sales due to algorithm changes.

bhouston 12y ago

It is a bit weird that "Harvard Business Review predicted that Amazon, Walgreens and other major internet retailers would soon follow eBay's lead and ditch AdWords. If you’re doing SEO, you get that prime SERP placement for free, right?" And then shortly there after eBay dropped significantly in Google's rankings. To be honest, the above statement from HBR is a major threat to Google's business. Coincidence?

phpnode 12y ago
> Coincidence? yes.
- bhouston 12y ago
  eBay was likely one of the largest AdWord buyers. They seemed to have spamming landing pages in Google for a long time but were never penalized. They stopped being a huge AdWord buyer. Soon after they were penalized in Google's search engine rankings. Coincidence? When there is that much money involved, and a possible exodus of Wallgreens and Amazon away from Adwords, I am not completely buying it. Google would be stupid to allow that to occur.
  - bryanlarsen 12y ago
    When we make our product better, we are also frequently rewarded with increased revenue.
- matthewmacleod 12y ago
  This. Can't be said enough. There's almost certainly not a concerted effort in Google to de-rank eBay, and you'd immediately hear it leak from one of the many people who would have to be involved if there were.
  - bhouston 12y ago
    It doesn't have to specifically target eBay to have the effect one wants. One just has to go after characteristics of spamminess that they didn't prioritize before. Like i said in another post, eBay has been spammy for a while, but it was not penalized. eBay and Amazon are huge spenders on Adwords according to this infochart (which may or may not be reliable): http://i.i.cbsi.com/cnwk.1d/i/tim/2012/01/24/google-earnings.png http://i.i.cbsi.com/cnwk.1d/i/tim/2012/01/24/google-earnings...

coldpie 12y ago

I've been using ebay once or twice a year for over a decade, and I've noticed their product pages are almost worthless these days. Almost the entire first scroll-page is filled with the bidding and shipping info and ads. For media like video games, there's another page of default info for the game which is identical on every single page for that game. I already know what I'm buying, you don't need to tell me the ESRB score. Then there's usually one or two lines of description from the seller. Then another page of ads and another page of the eBay footer. And this description is with AdBlock enabled! Content I want? Current price, shipping price, and the description from the seller. Everything else is garbage. The default pictures and descriptions are especially worthless. I want pictures of the actual product I'm buying, not whatever marketing shot of a pristine product from the company.

t0lk 12y ago
And the seller rating. I think a big selling point for Amazon is that all sellers are grouped by product and it becomes very easy to choose the best one. I'm never going to want to sort through 20 listings of the same product and I just don't see how eBay can overcome that fundamental problem. That, and as a seller I hate getting taxed twice for one sale.

Gracana 12y ago

"Dynamic Keyword Insertion" So that's what that awful misfeature is called. I hate those ads, they're always frustratingly unhelpful.

bowlofpetunias 12y ago
This is the primary reason why I also block text ads.
- ejk314 12y ago
  I see why you do, but that's such a shame. DKI a damn useful feature that could help both customers and businesses, but it's 'exploited' in a way that doesn't even help the people who are destroying it.
  - Kiro 12y ago
    Help how?
    - mathewsimonton 12y ago
      When used appropriately by the business it could alert the consumer of a relevant product/service and hopefully a special deal. This helps the consumer easily find the product/service and possibly save money. It also helps the business nab a sale they weren't necessarily organically ranking well for.
timje1 12y ago
Yep, it's extremely frustrating to find that a google search result that claims to contain what you've asked for, only to click through and find a search page with the following: 'No results for "what you just searched for" found here'
timdierks 12y ago
They're not so bad when they're not broken; a lot of the time, you can't even tell that an ad is using them, because it's natural and appropriate. Here's the (best) use case: let's say I sell garden equipment: hoses, sprinklers, garden gnomes, etc., so I advertise on those terms as keywords. I could have one ad that says "Best Garden Equipment", but tests show that ads work better if they specifically name the product that the user is looking for. So I can use keyword expansion to have the ad say "Best Garden Hoses", "Best Garden Sprinklers", "Best Garden Gnomes", etc., and not have to manage a lot of different ads. This can be used in much broader cases, too, such as if I have hotels in 500 US cities: load up the keyword expansion with the names of all 500 cities and run an ad with title "{CITY_NAME} Hotel Rooms". The problem is when people load it up with a jillion keywords in the hope that, if they get a click, they'll look for matches in their product database afterwards, and sometimes they fail. So, yes: frequently lame. But when it's not misused, pretty useful.

jqm 12y ago

I buy from eBay from time to time in spite of the fact I'm not completely crazy about them and wish they were better at what they do. At the moment, for better or worse, they seem to have the most sellers of the type I sometimes look for. That being said, as a Google search user I am delighted to see them lose search ranking. Is sucks seeing eBay listed in first page search results for just about everything. If I wanted to look for an item on eBay I would go to eBay. What I want is INFORMATION about the item/topic, not a link to eBay. Now, if they could just get ehow and about.com.....

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

strict9 12y ago

It's too bad sites aren't also penalized for fixed-position social share widgets that make reading on mobile impossible, like wordsteam does.

Donzo 12y ago
Yes, also full page overlays. Everytime one of these loads, I press back just on principle.
sokoloff 12y ago
They are indirectly penalized for it. Bounce rate is a factor in google's organic search algorithm. If a lot of users click-through a given search result, find a bad experience, google has incentive (and makes an effort) to penalize those results.
- ForHackernews 12y ago
  Wait, how can google measure that? Do they have a tracker that sees when I leave a site?
  - sokoloff 12y ago
    They get direct data on click-back. (Search, click, come back to google after a very short time, is a fair signal, in aggregate, that the users don't like that site's search results or other experience factor.) I don't believe they directly have bounce data, but they infer it from click-back. They have publicly stated that they do NOT use google analytics data to inform organic search rankings.

bowlofpetunias 12y ago

Wasn't eBay pretty much buried by Google for a while now? It's been ages since I've seen useless eBay results when searching for stuff like info on particular consumer products.

swalsh 12y ago
Not completely, recently I was in the market for some very specific pull handles for a dresser that i'm building. When I googled it, 2 websites selling very expensive recreations came up, and 1 ebay auction selling a modestly priced antique version, and an etsy store. Actually, the ebay link was quite useful to me to be honest.
drzaiusapelord 12y ago
and for good reason. I don't need to be linked to a scammy or expired auction from ebay when I'm searching for a retail product or review. Can you imagine going to Target or Best Buy and having some guy with a megaphone screeching at everyone about his used wares in the back of his van in the parking lot?

po 12y ago

Wait, are they buying AdWords and then putting Google Ads on the pages that people land on? Does that make any sense? Does Google pay out for those impressions?

jacquesm 12y ago
This practice is called arbitrage and can actually make money. I know a few people that live of this. It's against the TOS of almost any ad serving company but that doesn't mean it does not happen. (which is interesting, because you'd think it would be very easy to detect, and yet, people do it): https://support.google.com/adwordspolicy/answer/190442?hl=en https://support.google.com/adwordspolicy/answer/190442?hl=en What's interesting here is that you could argue that if you bought the traffic from party 'A' and sold it to party 'B' you should be free to do so. The only reason Google can (and does) put a stop to this is because they see both sides of the trades and your take is technically their loss. But people buying traffic on adsense or another source of traffic that is cheaper than the one where they are selling it could likely pull this sort of thing for years.
- vdaniuk 12y ago
  You are actually only somewhat right. While arbitrage is forbidden, placing AdWords ads on the pages that have value and purpose other than serving ads and simultaneously buying AdWords traffic is legitimate.
  - jacquesm 12y ago
    Then you're asking for trouble. Some google flunkey will have to determine what 'value' is, come down on the wrong side of your imaginary line and boom gone is your adsense account. It's a risk some are willing to take but I would be very careful with that strategy, especially if the pages are used in this combination right from day 1.
  - ChuckMcM 12y ago
    Jacques is correct here, if the ads on the landing page are substantially similar to the ad word buy then Google will penalize you. So if you buy and Ad for 'hair dryer' and you have a page which says "a hair dryer drys your hair." and a bunch more AdSense ads around it for buying a hair dryer from different vendors, that will eventually get you in trouble. It is however "ok" to buy an adword to a page about, say a '65 mustang restoration article you did. Have it be mostly an article about restoring a mustang and a "few" (for some opaque definition of a few) AdSense ads on the page which may or may not be related to the AdWords buy. But what is really the bottom line is that the variations are endless :-)

dcc1 12y ago

Thanks to Shitpal I have switched my shopping to Amazon. Ebay/Paypal deserve to die out.

perlpimp 12y ago

Does this mean that some sites will get a rise of Panda 4.0 deployment? And more interesting kind of sites will be get the rise out deployment of Panda 4.0. my 2c

jonknee 12y ago
Yes, in this case everyone who was under eBay on SERPs has gotten a rise. Every change makes winners and losers.

dabit3 12y ago

Ebay & Paypal are the worst companies I have ever had the displeasure of doing business with.

booruguru 12y ago
Well Paypal is owned by eBay so really it's just one really big, awful corporation.

lazyant 12y ago

With all the products eBay moves and so many users it shouldn't be difficult for eBay to reward in some way (less paypal fees, more prominent listings etc) users for writing reviews of products, creating cheap and reasonably good content. But I mean, if they buy ads for "By X" where X is any search term...

robryan 12y ago

Regarding eBay using Product Listing Ads, they already do this heavily, often to the point of being unfair (listing the same product say 5 times for 5 separate sellers on ebay) I think it will just hurt incremental sales, rather than them being able to make up the shortfall on Google via paid means.

willu 12y ago

This is basically the BloomReach approach to SEO and Google seems to be going after it in a serious way lately. The big issue is quality control. I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing to create these sorts of landing pages if they surface highly relevant results. Google's product search is not comprehensive or sophisticated enough yet to be useful for the common shopper so it's a mistake to penalize highly refined results with no good replacement.

dangrossman 12y ago
It's a shame that Google cares more about propping up ad click numbers for quarterlies than actually solving product search. They surely have the talent, data and traffic incentives for stores to do a much better job at it than anyone else. Instead, they went paid-only a while back, so Google's Shopping results are nothing but ads from the limited number of stores willing to upload a product list and pay for anything that gets clicked.
btown 12y ago
I worry (for BloomReach's sake) that Google will be unable to distinguish algorithmically between search-powered landing pages like eBay's, which (as mentioned in the article) are barely-usable collections of links designed specifically for SEO, and BloomReach-like auto-generated landing pages that are, quite literally, optimized for consumer usability. Just because a page is auto-generated and not curated doesn't make it spam. What makes something spam is that users treat it like spam, consider it spam. But unless Google's using (abusing?) its analytics cookies to track users on sites and see whether they treat an autogenerated page like linkspam or like a content page, they'd have no way of making that decision.

whoismua 12y ago

"The implication of this report was that eBay was going to drop AdWords as a channel and focus its efforts on organic search engine optimization. So how did that work out for them?" Hmmm.....just hmmm.... I do not buy that Google Search is not doing Google Adword's bidding, directly or indirectly. They know why advertises and who doesn't, by name and by category ("large brands" for example. ) So unless Google is separated in two separately owned parts (Search and Ads) I think people have every reason to question this. Especially since a drop in traffic essentially forces a site to buy ads. the same goes for Android and Chrome, many of their features are to drive people to Google search.

d23 12y ago

On a sidenote, did anyone else notice the popup that only appears once you're going to close the page? I've tried to re-create it, but it actually appears to be pretty intelligent. I was initially annoyed, since that's the standard reaction, but then I realized it didn't block my reading of the article at all, since I was attempting to leave anyway. Kind of cool.

thatthatis 12y ago
I saw those for the first time yesterday. Apparently some asshat has a patent on displaying an interstitial when the mouse moves above a certain x coordinate dressed up as "measuring exit intent"
- frankdenbow 12y ago
  In this case it was BounceExchange, but others like Exit Monitor & Picreel do the same thing. Its popular on e-commerce sites where you have a funnel for converting vistors to paid customers.
  - thatthatis 12y ago
    Yep, that's them. Bounce exchange is the one that has the garbage patent.
- noir_lord 12y ago
  This one hurts my head. They have a patent on moving the mouse cursor towards the address bar?!.

iblaine 12y ago

This reminds me that there was a time when eBay had no organic search traffic. A few pages were indexed. About the same time eBay launched their API. An enterprising college student created a site from ebays API. Normally this wouldn't have been a big deal but the new site had static pages, easy for googlebots to crawl & pages with affiliate links. The site went from generating a few hundred dollars per month in affiliate commissions to millions. eBay clearly didn't care about SEO back then so it's a bit ironic to read this today.

jwblackwell 12y ago

Auction pages don't really belong in search results. IMO. I think they had this coming.

cordite 12y ago

I hope #2 or #3 spot sites that only come up with a search page to other search engines that produce 0 relevant results die with this. Stack Overflow is usually at the top, but when I want relevant blog entries that actually cover what I'm working with, those get shoved to the back.