
Panda 4.0: Why eBay lost many of its organic rankings - gere
http://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2014/05/21/panda-4
======
leephillips
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!

~~~
jjoonathan
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.

~~~
dalore
I remember seeing those ads when I searched for "toilet paper"

I shuddered at the though of buying used toilet paper.

~~~
squeaky-clean
When my team is testing new AdWords functions or whatever, we like to pick a
funny keyword like that, which is also guaranteed to have no one competing
against us, so we can easily view our ad in the #1 spot. Sometimes Amazon will
actually outbid us on ads for things like "Pre-Chewed Bubblegum" or whatever
stupid phrase we've chosen that week. It's always funny to see. You can't even
be angry that your ad isn't visible when that happens.

------
Gracana
"Dynamic Keyword Insertion"

So _that 's_ what that awful misfeature is called. I hate those ads, they're
always frustratingly unhelpful.

~~~
timdierks
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.

~~~
rwmj
When we ran the AdWords account for [major UK travel agency that you will have
heard of] we _never_ used templates. We created 50000+ keywords and thousands
of associated adverts -- with a mix of hand-written keywords/ads and custom
code to generate them. And we tuned the results frequently, which often
involving writing more code. (In OCaml, no less!)

If you don't take shortcuts, you get better results.

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

~~~
otisfunkmeyer
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....

~~~
dingaling
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
> 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
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
> 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.

------
coldpie
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
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.

------
bhouston
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
> Coincidence?

yes.

~~~
matthewmacleod
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
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...](http://i.i.cbsi.com/cnwk.1d/i/tim/2012/01/24/google-earnings.png)

------
adventured
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.

------
strict9
It's too bad sites aren't also penalized for fixed-position social share
widgets that make reading on mobile impossible, like wordsteam does.

~~~
sokoloff
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
Wait, how can google measure that? Do they have a tracker that sees when I
_leave_ a site?

~~~
sokoloff
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.

------
willu
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
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.

------
jqm
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.....

------
d23
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
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
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
Yep, that's them. Bounce exchange is the one that has the garbage patent.

------
cordite
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.

------
iblaine
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.

------
bowlofpetunias
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
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.

------
po
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
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
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.

~~~
ChuckMcM
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 :-)

------
lazyant
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
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.

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

------
dabit3
Ebay & Paypal are the worst companies I have ever had the displeasure of doing
business with.

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

------
whoismua
_" 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.

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

------
dcc1
Thanks to Shitpal I have switched my shopping to Amazon. Ebay/Paypal deserve
to die out.

