Shops fall out of Google results

eBay sellers watching their traffic reports closely last month might have noticed a drop in their traffic coming via Google. What they didn’t realise until today was that Google traffic had fallen not just to individual shops, but to the whole site. An eBay employee on the Powerseller Board (sorry, you can’t get in if you’re not a PS) described Google’s change as a “massacre”, saying:

one week 2,000 of the keywords we track were returning a Shops page on the first page of results, the next week it was 300.

It seems likely that this is the result of one of Google’s periodic changes to their search algorithm: please, lets not have any silly conspiracy theories about revenge for eBay’s banning of Google Checkout. Lets just hope that eBay’s search engine optimisation experts can get us back up at the top of the list again soon.

5 Responses on "Shops fall out of Google results"

1. 1
   Aaron says:

   March 28, 2007 at 5:52 pm

   Maybe it’s payback for Google “bait” spam being included in listings? Google doesn’t usually look too kindly on this sort of thing.
2. 2
   Chairman says:

   March 29, 2007 at 12:06 am

   I noticed that Yahoo passed Google for the % share of traffic to my eBay store Imports-and-Slavic-Books.

   Considering Yahoo used to be half the % of Google hits thats a pretty huge drop
3. 3
   Lisa says:

   March 29, 2007 at 6:01 am

   Aarf! Please no conspiracy theories??? Okay, um… Google LOVES eBay, so much so that they want eBay to be more successful than them! They would never, ever do anything that might drop eBay’s ranking – EVER. Ya happy now? I told ya what ya wanted to hear.
4. 4
   Sue Bailey says:

   March 29, 2007 at 8:24 am

   Lisa: Have “ya” considered exactly what you’re saying about Google here? Although Page Rank is to an extent arbitrary (indeed, it’s arbitrariness has been enshrined in US law recently), the reputation of Google’s search engine rests on the perception that it is impartial, and that the results it gives are the best match for the query. If Google were to start messing with that, and removing their competitors from their rankings “manually”, they would have shot themselves in the foot mightily. I don’t believe they’re about to do that. Especially to their largest customer.

   And anyway, if Google wanted to use their own search results to promote themselves over their competitors, don’t you think they’d be a bit higher up the page for “search engine” results?
5. 5
   eBay Italy competition for reviews : TameBay says:

   May 21, 2007 at 2:32 pm

   [...] I really like this competion, with visibility of eBay listings dropping out of Google, encouraging rich search engine friendly content makes sense. Even if you don’t sell the products directly related to your reviews they will not only attract search engine traffic to eBay, but buyers can click through to your eBay listings and discover what you do sell. I’d really like eBay.co.uk to run a promotion like this! [...]