27 July 2014

Ebay Is Saying Google SEO Changes Are Hurting Their Business And Profits

By Nazar Bryant


If you have been watching the news on eBay, you probably have heard that although they had nearly reached their projections for their second quarter earnings, roughly $4.37 billion, they fell short because of algorithm changes made by Google. Apparently, Google decided to penalize eBay because of marketing tactics that it was using, not so much the result of the Google panda algorithm which looks for thin sites or pages that have less than meaningful content.



It is said that eBay plans to spend more money on Google advertising, but this is probably just to appease the Google gods. They have publicly stated that paid advertising is not effective at all for larger businesses, and therefore it is doubtful that this is the direction they will actually go in. The use of organic listings has brought more revenue in for eBay, but not to the core site itself as of late. There was also the security breach that happened, effectively causing a global password reset to occur, which may play a role in the lack of quarterly earnings.

The goal of any Internet marketing business is to make sure that they stay within the guidelines of Google, especially when doing organic search engine marketing. Hopefully eBay will reprise their tactics that Google seems to have a problem with, allowing them to generate more revenue, and improve their search engine positioning, for their listings online.

Once you have a good look at what Google does to SEO and how it harms businesses like eBay, you can really start to see that it's a legitimate concern. Hopefully Google will learn to start working at this and stop hurting people in the process. In the quest to stop people from abusing the system, it's starting to hurt those that don't.

They are definitely against paid search, stating that it is literally ineffective when it comes to advertising major brands simply because everyone already knows who they are. This should be a wake-up call, however, for eBay to play smarter game, one that will keep them under the radar, and allow them to benefit from the Google search engine.

It could be that this is a power-play, one that Google is using to its advantage to make a point in regard to how much power they actually have. It's hard to imagine that eBay listings could be thought of as thin, something that the Google Panda update goes after, get the problem may actually be found in the number of affiliates that are marketing eBay listings on WordPress blogs trying to make commissions.




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