Is Google hitting eBay while they are down?

Ever since 9/16 when fp30 rolled along with a bunch of finding bugs, we have seen sales plummet in many categories with apparel and jewelry being hit the hardest.

While most sellers are focusing in on some of the eBay finding wackiness, one seller noticed google had all but disappeared as a 'source' of traffic in their advanced store reports.

Based on that tip, we started doing some looking and saw some very unusual behavior.

Here's a search for a popular Nike product's model number:

Notice that the second, third and fifth search results are all for eBay international sites and not ".com"

I've run literally hundreds of searches and you have to really work now to find eBay in the organic (and even paid I'll add) google results.  Interestingly enough, when I did find the occasional eBay listing in the index, it was an FP30.

Note that eBay's pagerank (PR) doesn't seem to have changed - it's at 8/10.

Theories on what is going on...
I have a couple of quick theories on what's going on:

• Given their track record in the last couple of weeks, it's possible that eBay has done something to mess up the crawlability of the site.
• It could be that eBay has asked google to not crawl anything but fp30 dramatically reducing the number of eBay listings in the google index (this doesn't seem very smart, but hey anything's possible I guess)
• It could be that Google is using this tough spot for eBay to kick them in the ribs and has decided that eBay listings are 'not relevant' and yanked them from the index.

Personally I think the last theory is the most probable given the near overnight disappearance of eBay's listings from the Google index.

Readers - any insights into what you are seeing/think is going on?
SeekingAlpha Disclosure: I am long eBay and Google

Comments

[CY]

Perhaps Google is ticked off about the new Paypal and Propay only policy. As I understand it, if a seller accepts "alternative" forms of payment too often, Ebay will investigate and could suspend them. This would mean sellers won't be using Google Checkout much.

[SunshineStyles]

I've been putting all of my inventory in FP30 with free shipping since Sep. 16. I'm having amazing results, my listings turn up at the top of ebay searches most of the time, my Google traffic is rising, and my Omniture reports show that I'm getting triple the traffic with the new ebay search vs. the old search before the change. I think, as you say, that ebay is advantaging FP30 listings both in Google results and obviously in ebay best match search.

[Robyn]

Oh. My. Thanks for the explanation on why the eBay part of my business tanked even more since fp30 rolled out.

I just checked a few of my full titles, and not one that I checked appeared AT ALL on Google. The best that appeared was my AdWords campaign.

My suspicion is that eBay deliberately or accidentally "broke" the feed. It's like watching a train wreck in horrified fascination. The difference is that I am *on* the train in this case.

[Tom]

Either eBay is broken or traffic to the site has fallen off dramatically in the last couple of weeks. We are the 800lb gorillas in every category we enter and still retain 40-50% market share in those categories, but conversions have dropped by 50-70% over that time frame. Our AdWords sales are now greater than our eBay sales and that is a first since 2003 for us, A3P a distant 3rd unfortunately due to niche product.

If you aren't an eBay multi-millionaire already, give up the dream.

I have been short eBay and almost equally long Google for a couple of months now. Scot, being the amazingly bright guy I know you are... why do you punish yourself by holding eBay stock? They are scrambling to emulate others (A3P, now AdWords seemingly) rather than focusing on their strength in niche products, much to their detriment.

[Dan]

I search for "1794 BENJAMIN FRANKLIN 'WORKS'; AM. HISTORY ELECTRICITY" in Google and eBay's new site appears as the 4th item in the 1st page. So, it's not true that eBay's listings are not appearing in Google.

[Tim]

In my experience: 1) Google works. 2) eBay is broken or breaking in some key aspect of the site nearly at all times.

And yet you want to lay this at Google's feet? I am just as sure, given my own admittedly no-data-to-back-it-up experience, that this is eBay's fault.

I mean, really, what are the odds of Google doing something that happens to time with a major eBay change roll out... or eBay just breaking something during a major change roll out? The odds are astronomically in favor of the latter.

[Sudhi]

Google is a company who changes there "policies" a little too much every now and then. They might have suddenly felt that the ebay pages that they are indexing are not that relevant to the actual keywords being searched. Google is a company who will give importance to one and only thing and that is relevance. In front of their policies no body stands. I guess Ebay needs to pay some attention to their SEO :-)

[TekGems]

I don't keep counts, but it would be good to do daily sites of the various eBay sites using Google's site: command if you want to see if it is an indexing issue.

[tj]

Simple..eBay is broke

How these fools can still get people to pay listing fees is beyond me...guess too many sheep out there

PEOPLE WAKE UP..eBay is going down due to the stupid CEO & management

[MyLegacy]

Got an order from eBay Germany last week with an item already sold about a month ago. Have had problem with eBay doing this in the past, so I remove item photos from server when each item is sold. The ebay.de listing included all item photos - obviously a cached cc of my listing but without expiration due to item being sold. I sell mostly OOAK, one-of-a-kind with no option of multiples. If this happened to me once, there is high likelihood it is happening to others, too.

Sharp drop off in business this week vs. last week. I use Google Base daily to update 10-25 listings that are new or have changed. eBay now de-favoring fp30 listings and favoring quantity item listing RTC on fixed price format and auctions. fp30 listings and store listings not on RTC would have logically been best for search engines like google, ask, yahoo, msn, etc. eBay selection of RTC means less emphasis/results from outside search engines, more via eBay 'best match' and algorithm tweaking favoring white box volume sellers of generic merchandise based upon quantity of actual sales by that seller for that SKU.

[Peter Leeflang / CEO of Leeflang Archives Corporation]

Hi Scott,

I have to disagree with blaming Google for Ebay's absence in the search results.

More likely it is Ebay who is not sending feeds of store items to Google anymore, as they are intent on killing the store listings altogether in favor of 30FP.

Ebay is thus trying to force sellers to move all their inventory to 30FP.

Peter

[dimes]

Try looking on eBay for that same search term: 315378-141.

I just did, and in both the old and new 'search' formats got zero core results and 2 store results.

What kind of results are google going to return for eBay, if the items aren't even coming up in eBay searches as being listed on the site?

[Mechelle]

My traffic reports clearly demonstrate that on September 16th eBay injected the "new search experience" into the site. Just as abruptly Google traffic began and has continued to slow. The "new search experience" is now dominating the traffic to my listings (not that there is much to speak of actually the lack of is more interesting). Yesterday the 23rd eBay classic was 1.2% of search engine paths, the new search 66.7%, Google 30.9%, Yahoo 1.2%.

Clearly, not only did eBay ruin the eBay search with their "new search experience" they also effectively killed the google search path to eBay

I agree because I use Google Base daily my traffic is only down about 15% from Google and I use adwords.

It isn't Google's malicious attack on eBay - it is eBay's incompetent, idiotic, disaster of the "new search experience". Clearly, the prior eBay CTO ran because JD was hell bent on releasing a crappy, glitchy, certain to fail algorithm.

Thanks again JD you loser

[Kevin]

Scot, perhaps Google is angry at eBay at the moment because, with todays announcement that sellers can now do PPC ads for their own listings on eBay, eBay is now almost directly copying Google's model within its' own environment.

I hope nobody here underestimates Google's power. They could turn off eBay in a second and really not feel anything from a revenue perspective, even though eBay may be their largest customer.

-Kevin

[John Lawson]

Here is some supporting graphs for you at http://is.gd/35cX

[chris]

Maybe Google is upset about this...

"eBay Adcommerce", just got announced today...Apparently eBay is copying google Adwords and offering contextual advertising in their search results.

[Chris]

Would the "advances" in Finding/Search on eBay have any effect on this? I guess my question is since people are supposively clicking on fewer listings now, because the results are better, would this cause the listings to drop off the Google search results?

Also, are sellers experiencing fewer clicks per listing?

Another possible thought is that could it be that since the "content" of the listing will be changing less on fp30 listings is that causing the status to change?

[Sally K]

My experience exactly. US sales in the toilet. I can put in my entire auction listing title and it won't show on Google.
International more than healthy. Whatever it is, needs to get resolved, yesterday...

[Scot Wingo]

@tekgems - dude you must have missed this in the article: "I've run literally hundreds of searches".
This one screen shot is an example of HUNDREDS.

S

[Ed Roberts]

I would be VERY surprised to see Google intentionally yank eBay listings. In fact, if Google doesn't deliver quality results, they loose out on potential advertising (and after all, Google IS and advertising company). If there are search terms that seem to draw out of eBay more than others, it'd be all the more reason for a company to purchase pay-per-click.

By the way things seem to have disappeared, I wouldn't be surprised if eBay inadvertently got some sort of penalty that knocked them 40 spots (or God help us, a full 1000). Either way, would would seriously doubt it's intentional.

(BTW: page rank does little to effect the actual ranking of search results, rather preference about if a site falls into the 1000 results it pulls up.)

[Anonymous]

Dude, you're a smart guy...how in the world are you long eBay?

[Michael S.]

Seen the same thing the past several weeks. Used to get half our hits from Google, now virtually none.

Here's what we discovered searching some of our rare store items:

Just googled some rare books: Emblemata, Sixty Years of Progress, Easton Press Perfect Storm, Easton Press History of Art.

What we found is that you have to put eBay in front of the book names to get them found on Google, this was not the case before, they used to come up on the top of the search page. A few showed, but scary how many are not now showing in Google. Saw the same thing, the ebay international extensions and rare if any .com listings. Only one showed .com, Perfect Storm.

[Jim S.]

That's interesting. I can't see any of my items on Google search and I'm usually near the top. And I use GoogleBase too.

[Ansgar Founder verKoopwinkel (SellingStore)]

Hi Scot,
A great post on eBay SEO ! (Your blog is one of the best on eBay issues.) Sorry can't help with any insights on eBay.com
I have a offline store in The Netherlands with ads on the local eBay classified site called www.marktplaats.nl ,they always score very high, but with outdated ads. (There is no Google Base in NL yet.)
Kind regards,
Ansgar

[Glenn]

Hi Scott - Interesting article - I've noticed a HUGE drop in sales since last Tuesday. I did a "Disney ESPN Shirt" google search and just three listings showed up (all mine) - I think it's because I submitted them to Google Base but in that search only my store & fixed price listings came in. When I did a search in eBay using the same term there were 14 results all from different sellers. Very confusing.

Glenn