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<p><pre><code> Vomit Sale!
New and used vomit!
Check out the deals now!</code></pre>
"Dynamic Keyword Insertion"<p>So <i>that's</i> what that awful misfeature is called. I hate those ads, they're always frustratingly unhelpful.
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.<p>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.
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!<p>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.
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?"<p>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.<p>Coincidence?
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.<p>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.
It's too bad sites aren't also penalized for fixed-position social share widgets that make reading on mobile impossible, like wordsteam does.
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 <i>if</i> 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.
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.<p>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.....
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.
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.<p>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.
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.
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.
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?
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...
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)<p>I think it will just hurt incremental sales, rather than them being able to make up the shortfall on Google via paid means.
Does this mean that some sites will get a rise of Panda 4.0 deployment?<p>And more interesting kind of sites will be get the rise out deployment of Panda 4.0.<p>my 2c
<i>"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.<p>So how did that work out for them?"</i><p>Hmmm.....just hmmm....<p>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.<p>the same goes for Android and Chrome, many of their features are to drive people to Google search.