Ebay hit by Panda 4.0 Again, landing pages suffer, Ebay decimated
Everyone knows about Ebay being hit by the Google Panda update in May, but now it looks as if the auction site has been hit again by Google. The hit this time seems ubiquitous across all verticals.
Here i show examples of the electrical goods market with buckets of search term groups in:
- Digital Set top boxes
- Televisions
- TV accessories
- Gaming and gaming devices
- DVD, Blu Ray and Home cinema search terms.
Chart 1) Ebay drops in visibility indexes across electrical related search terms, Google UK
What I have noticed is that Ebay’s category pages have been decimated. Generally Ebay has lost around 2-3 pages across the SERPs where the landing or category page has dropped outside the top 100, but the product pages that have replaced it is simply not as strong.
Here is an overview of some of Ebay’s drops – Pre Panda update and Post update. As you will see from the chart, the search terms are on the left and the before and after URLs are in the following columns. Look at the changes in URLs, the URL on the left was appearing before the hit, and the one on the right is what appears today.
Chart 2) Search terms for Ebay.co.uk, Google UK, electrical workspaces and returning URLs
In the red chart above all the nice clean URLs are on the left then (due to the panda update and the snippet nature of the pages) they drop out of all recognition.
A visual example of this can be seen here in the following chart.
Chart 3) Position Explorer Chart, search term: “Widescreen TV” Site: ebay.co.uk, Google UK
Above you can see that the Pink line (representing the Widescreen TV landing page from Ebay) drops entirely out of the SERPs, from position 2 to outside the top 100. The yellow line represents the rest of the Ebay.co.uk site, there it can only manage to place around page 4.
This drop is down to the lack of content and general links to Ebay’s multitude of category pages. If this continues EBay may have had their day in search.