eBay 1 Year After Dropping AdWords

Pay up or get booted.

[Brett_Tabke]

I was just at an eBay sellers conference. The hot topic was the recent organic rankings hit Google leveled upon eBay.

[fool.com...]

It was just 1 year ago when eBay stopped purchasing AdWords when they announced to the world that AdWords was a complete failure and doesn't work:

[slate.com...]

what the eBay team found—overall, there was no appreciable decline in sales of eBay listings in the part of the country where Google ad purchases were shut off.

I have not seen a more egregious case of Googles complete duplicity and lack of transparency in it's search methods. I think it clearly sends a signal to others that if you want organic results, you have to "pay up" or you will be booted.

[goodoldweb]

We operate two ebay stores with more than 450 items combined. Whatever happened with Google, it virtually brought business on eBay to a stand still. The ebay message boards are full with seller messages complaining sales are almost non exsistant lately. Us included. It all started about 2.5 months ago and just getting worse.

Google simply took away all the long tail searches leaving ebay to die a slow painful death... that's how it feels to many long time sellers there anyway...

[Martin Ice Web]

@gow, is there no Traffic or is there Traffic but no Sales and a high bounce?

[graeme_p]

All the pages that have lost Google ranking were in a single directory that contains doorway pages meant purely to tank in search engines. The pages people actually want to go to have kept their rankings:

[refugeeks.com ]

Take your tinfoil hats off! It looks like Google has applied the same standards to a big brand that always applied to the rest of us. Good.

[Awarn]

They just eliminated the bhp/ directory on Ebay and Ebay came right back with the sch/ directory and the popular. subdomain. I see no effect at all. That bhp area was heavy in schema markup.

[Robert Charlton]

Take your tinfoil hats off! It looks like Google has applied the same standards to a big brand that always applied to the rest of us. Good.

Google had said about ten weeks back that something was in the works, and we discussed it here...

Softer Panda Update Coming Soon
Mar 14, 2014
http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4654074.htm [webmasterworld.com]

When I first heard that eBay had dropped, that's what I assumed this was about. I'm wondering what the reaction would be if there had been an update and these pages had continued to rank.

[goodoldweb]

@martin Ice

Anemic exposure, low traffic numbers, hardly any views, bids or even buyers questions. A general "Ghost Town" feeling.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

I don't think adwords, or even Google, had anything to do with ebay creating thousands of /bhp doorway pages. It probably doesn't help that the entire /bhp section of ebay stands for "black hat pages" if the rumors are true. I do know, however, that when I noticed an ebay page competing against my page it was always of low quality and often was a copy/paste of a portion of my own content.

This is what you get when your content is 100% user generated and your users don't particularly like your site.