Google and eBay may be about to butt heads over the latest update to the Google search algorithm dubbed Panda.
This is according to Larry Kim, CEO of search marketing company Wordstream, reports Business Insider.
This will likely leave eBay feeling rather displeased toward Google, as eBay is the second biggest customer for Google’s paid shopping PLAs. Despite their status as a valued customer, however, on the organic search side, eBay is soon to be treated as though they are a professional spamming operation. Before the Panda upgrade, eBay had a solid organic search ranking such that one could rely on seeing an eBay page in the first page of a Google search result on more or less than item that one would want to purchase.
The massive penalty eBay is now suffering at the hand of Google Panda springs from two factors, according to Kim. The first is an autofill-like function that inserts any word an individual is searching for into an add–leading to search results for odd things like vomit to crop up from time to time.
“eBay’s asleep-at-the-switch AdWords management style not only made them look stupid to searchers – those irrelevant ads also cost a brand a ton of money. Their failure to implement even the most basic of paid search best practices, like using negative keywords so you’re not appearing in queries for vomit, made their research completely unreliable,” Kim says.
The other issues is landing pages that contain only links to products or services, since Panda is optimized to reward pages that offer a full compliment of interesting content.
At press time, neither Google or eBay were willing to comment on the story.
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