Panda 4.0: Why eBay lost many of its organic rankings

Does that count as false advertising? Can you just say "I am selling X on my site" even if you aren't?

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-n...

It gets worse:

    Black People!
    New and used Black People!
    Check out the deals now!

I'm fairly certain there is a filter of some kind because the first time I saw this circling the internet I wasn't able to replicate the "screenshot" of the ad. Still, it didn't take long to find a substitute phrase that was substantively identical but successfully triggered the dynamic keyword insertion ad.

I used to work on buying keywords at eBay 10 years ago, and one of the first features we built was a suppression list to prevent exactly this, so I'm a little surprised to see this. These ads can be costly, embarrassing, or carry a legal liability. It's possible they dropped the ball with a big bug that no one noticed, but it's also possible an affiliate was buying these ads hoping to turn a conversion.

I should just note the exclamation points are yours.. Google would disallow any ad with excessive punctuation.

One exclamation point seems to be the limit.

I remember in high school searching for info on the W80 nuclear warhead and seeing a similar ad for "New and used W80 warheads". Not sure what the shipping's like on craters.

Worse, it seemed that the more esoteric the search term, the more likely it was to show up in one of those goofy ads. I'm not sure if that's actually the case, or if I was just more likely to notice because the dearth of organic results prompted me to pay more attention to the ads.

But, in any case, it was definitely noticeable that they were "spamming" AdWords with worthless ads that frequently led to nowhere useful on eBay's site.

This is the primary reason why I also block text ads.

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'

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.

When done right they are terrific for both the consumer and advertiser.

I would much rather Amazon spend sometime fixing their terrible terrible search.

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.

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.

> Coincidence?

yes.

Yes, also full page overlays. Everytime one of these loads, I press back just on principle.

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.

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.

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.

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"

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.

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?

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

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.

Google gets paid for the AdWords click and then if someone clicks the ad on eBay they will get paid again (splitting it with eBay). Win win.

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

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