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Deconstructing eBay.com’s Organic Loss Using SEMrush

May 21, 2014
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Dr Pete over at Moz just covered some interesting ground over Ebay.coms ranking losses on a post titled Panda 4.0, Payday Loan 2.0 & eBay’s Very Bad Day.

Set up a FREE SEMrush account to test their tool Click Here!

Now unless you have access to the keywords that Moz tracks, or your own inventory of regularly tracked keywords, you have to take Dr Pete’s word for it when he notes down keywords that eBay lost out on. However, there are alternative ways of understanding how to deconstruct such a major hit, and one of them is by the use of SEMrush’s Organic Positions drill down.

So lets see what SEMrush shows us:

initial view ebay dot com

As you can see, SEMrush recorded a dramatically higher volume of lost keywords vs the keywords gained. So this supports the theory that Ebay.com took a major hit.

By clicking on the lost keyword bar, I can extract  the full list of keywords SEMrush say a decline in rankings for eBay.com:

ebay dot com keywords lost

Now, if you search for “Black mens jumpsuit” eBay seems to have gone https://www.google.com/search?q=black+mens+jumpsuit&oq=black+mens+jumpsuit&pws=0

What’s more interesting to me, is that I often see the dot com version in UK serps for long tail queries. It seems that this update or whatever it was, has hurt the dot com in UK serps:

ebay dot com keywords lost UK

One of the lost keywords was https://www.google.co.uk/#q=iphone+5+cases And a search in the UK indicates the fall from the top 10. This is a heavy search term keyword, so you can assume its loss from the top 10 could significantly impact traffic and sales. However at position 9, maybe the loss wasn’t as significant. But how do I know that the data is correct?

Well, you can check historical search engine result pages using SEMrush, so I dug into the March SERPs for the phrase “iphone 5 cases”:

iphone 5 case serps Mar 1

Wait, hold on, is that the .co.uk with sitelinks? Interesting. But not what I was looking for.

iphone 5 case serps Mar 2

Ah, there you go, position 9 as recorded, it’s the .com. So ebay had both the .co.uk and .com versions of that page indexed and ranking. So maybe the loss in the traffic isn’t  so bad, since the UK page is still there… right?

Actually no. This is todays screenshot:

iphone 5 case serps May 21

So eBay has not only lost the .com ranking in the UK serps, its lost its .co.uk rankings too. Lets see what SEMrush says:

ebay dot co uk keywords lost UK

Looks like ebay uk hasn’t had a great week either then.

Well this is getting interesting. Lets dig a bit deeper.

As Dr Pete highlights, Some of the losses he tracked were on category pages such as /www.ebay.com/ bhp / led-fiber-optic-christmas-tree

In my example, the loss was www.ebay.co.uk/ bhp/ iphone-5-case

Can you see the “bhp” in the URL?

The interesting thing about THAT url is that a normal user journey will NOT take you to it. I.e, if I open up eBay.co.uk:

ebay journey

The actual URL to the computer category is http://www.ebay.co.uk/electronics/mobile-home-phone  which then redirects to : http://www.ebay.co.uk/rpp/mobile-home-phone:

ebay journey 2

That url should be: http://www.ebay.co.uk/sch/Cases-Covers-/20349/i.html

ebay journey 3

After this, you have to use facets to get deeper.

You can t try it whichever way you like, I couldn’t see how a non google referred user gets to that “bhp” page. Links to it might be buried deep in eBays mammoth site somewhere, but essentially these “category” pages aren’t real category pages, but pages created for search engines, and users alike as target starting pages.

Edit: Dan from Screaming Frog had some additional observations:

 

 

I have seen them before and analysed them and even joked “BHP” stands for “Black Hat Pages”, but I would like to stress, I DON’T think that there was anything wrong in the way the site created and optimised these for the serps. It was pretty clever actually, but I think it WAS overdone.

BHP Pages an Issue

So do I think these category pages are part of the problem?

Using SEMrush’s filter functions, you can actually see that of the 120K plus pages that lost rankings, nearly 90K were those with “BHP” in the URLs:

BHP pages to blame

Infact, SEMrush hasn’t completed its scan, but here are keywords it still thinks that eBay ranks for, which have “bhp” in the URL: http://www.semrush.com/uk/info/ebay.co.uk+(by+organic)?filter=%2B%7CUr%7CCo%7Cbhp&page=1 (you need pro account to access screenshot below):

BHP pages still losing

But here are some examples for those without Pro access:

  • star trek uniform
  • ryobi parts
  • iron man mask
  • ping i20 irons
  • slipknot masks
  • nitro rc cars
  • oompa loompa costume
  • honda c90
  • koi carp for sale
  • cheap xbox 360 games
  • motorola gleam
  • gameboy advance sp
  • decoupage paper
  • disney dvd collection
  • sticker bomb
  • deadpool costume
  • scart to hdmi cable
  • nokia 6310i
  • beach chairs
  • wooden activity cube

A cursory check indicates that majority of these no longer rank. And that indicates how you could carry out some simple audits on rank losses using JUST SEMrush. For the full SEMrush Guide, follow this link. Set up a FREE SEMrush account to test their tool Click Here!
Interested in Link Audits? Get simple audits here.

Deconstructing eBay.com’s Organic Loss Using SEMrush
User Rating: 4.2 (9 votes)
By Rishi Lakhani
Rishi has been a consultant in online marketing for over 10 years, specialising in SEO, PPC, Affiliate Marketing, Email and Social Media. Over the years he has worked with many brands as well as many small businesses.
  • Yousaf

    Good analysis. Site architecture then :)

  • James

    Awesome. I didn’t make the connection myself. Not convinced it’s about site architecture yet (parasite pages still seem to be ranking).

    Those landing pages seem to be accessed via http://popular.ebay.co.uk/

    • rishil

      I dont think its site architecture either. I think this is a manual
      penalty due to those doorway type pages they have created. I think a
      whole bunch still rank, but nowhere near the volume they had.

      • James

        I accidentally investigated this today. My thoughts are at http://inbound.org/discussion/view/should-ebay-s-stock-price-drop-to-reflect-it-losing-80-of-organic-traffic#comment-136488

      • David Varnai

        From an internal source, I am pretty sure this is a manual penalty.

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  • http://www.nakulgoyal.com/ Nakul Goyal

    Nice post Rishi. Love SEMRush. Love the BHP = Black Hat Pages = LOL

  • http://www.agentblackhat.com agentblackhat.com

    I think for transparency reasons Google should clarify why the site was hit. Or could it possibly be that the algorithm is off in a mind of its own and has hit ebay in a way they never intended? Afterall, Google is trust the future of sites like Ebay on piece of code.

  • Arianne Donoghue

    The cynic in me wonders what impact it will have on eBay and their Adwords spend. After all, eBay losing rankings soon after announcing “Adwords is ineffective” would have looked a bit dodgy, but a year on? Sure!

    I doubt the two events are in any way related, but I do love a good conspiracy theory.

    • http://www.agentblackhat.com agentblackhat.com

      Well, stranger things have happened. Did you ever read about the affiliate marketing side of Ebay and the owner of DigitalPoint Forums? Whenever individuals come into high places where lots of money is being exchanged it is only a matter of time before someone makes a decisions which is not in fair play.

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  • http://www.seo-theory.com/ Michael Martinez

    You can navigate to the “/bhp/” pages through the “See also …” widget in the left margin on the search results pages. I would not say these are made for search but they are certainly an alternative navigation. So far it looks to me like Google is still going after the kinds of things it went after with Panda 1.0, but apparently it has found some new signals to ferret out the superfluous on-page content.

    • Rishil

      Yep, if you see the embedded tweets by Dan…
      However I think these aren’t alternate pages like you say, I ran through a range of them, and they have most certainly been optimised better than normal ebay content. The extent to which the keyword coverage and the anchor footer links on product pages that are all signs that these pages were being juiced using site strength. All in all it was quite well done, just overkill IMHO.

      • http://www.seo-theory.com/ Michael Martinez

        They are doing that to every page, not just to the BHP pages. Your claim in the article is that a user cannot get to those pages without going through Google, and that’s simply not true. The links are there in the margin navigation on all the search results pages. They are also in the product listing (/ITM/) page footers.

        When you have 100 million Web pages to manage, you’ll find all sorts of ways to interconnect them, too, and the user will NOT be able to navigate to them all from the home page. That is why we use site search tools and related content widgets.

        Historically Panda is looking at presentational factors. The fact a page is deeply buried on the site is hard to tie to presentation. Some pages just won’t have as much visibility as others. But eBay is embedding cross-promotional links in a logical fashion.

        I’m sorry but your analysis just misses the mark.

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  • FrancoLucchetti

    I think Rishi Lakhani was right, the Ebay strategy creating BHP page was pretty cleaver but the real problem was overdoing it. They created these for all categories, main categories with broad terms and you can see it here
    site:www.ebay.co.uk inurl:/sch/

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  • Grant Simmons

    Winners & losers seeing similar things. Appears to align with Google goals.
    Update is considering quality / dupes / accessibility (site hierarchy) as factors of rankability.
    So far seems quite ‘fair’ in assessment, we’re analyzing fluctuations, and will definitely leverage SEMRush as one of our tools. Cheers

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  • http://www.irishwonder.com IrishWonder

    For the amount of duplicate content one would expect on a large site like that, they have a surprisingly short robots file. TBH I have not checked if they noindex anything onpage.

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  • http://amitkroy.worpress.com Amit Roy

    Hi Rajiv,

    Is it that over optimization of an anchor text and not linking to correct product pages is the prime factor for e bay fall out. I see that mostly search phrases didn’t lead to any particular page but a category pages only. The query strings results sounded spammy for Panda 2.0 and they are penalized for those links. Hope, I’m right!!

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  • http://www.brainvire.com/ Chintan Shah

    Great Analysis !! i got this blog mentioned in moz blog and It was great to see the whole analysis of ebay so does and i have lots of question does it is going to effect internal link building strategies ??

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  • http://www.fuzzone.com/ Kunle Campbell

    Looks like you are unto something there Rishi, as it appears to be a manual penalty.
    A search for

    site:ebay.com inurl:/bhp/

    has zero results with the /bhp/ directory.
    Google seems ignoring the /bhp/ directory which was really host for doorway pages.
    Also seeing something similar on the /rpp/ and /sch/ directories.
    Worth further investigating…

    • Bree Daniél Normandin

      It is. It’s directly related to the sites most recent content marketing efforts that has hundreds of mill writers churning out buying guides with sch and bhp links scattered throughout the content.

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  • Joshua Boles

    Great analysis. The URL structure is often overlooked in data analysis.

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  • http://GodOfSEO.Co/ Charles Floate

    Nice Analysis Rishi, Black Hat Pages hehe..

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  • Bree Daniél Normandin

    Ebay is currently actively engaged in a content marketing campaign that utilizes ten links within ebay buying guides that are currently being mass produced by content writers at two different major content mills. Writers are required to add these bhp links throughout the article. This campaign has been ongoing for the past month and a half. Yes, it is very overdone. It’s amazing to see how this content marketing campaign is affecting the site ranking. It’s definitely not helping. I wonder if ebay will adjust or keep the status quo. I really think the days of gaming the system are over. Create original content that engages audiences and inspires sharing. C’mon eBay, you can do better than this!

  • CTOH

    Ebay is going in the tank, thanks to Donohoe & his merry band of misfits. Why doesn’t one of you smart, entrpreneurial types start a NEW eBay, based on the original ‘online garage sale’ ebay, where auctions for quality collectibles reigned? There are lots of other selling sites out there – but no one advertises and sales are dismal. Unfortunately, eBay is still the elephant in the room. But, both buyers and sellers are leaving ebay in droves. Ebay is trying to be Amazon, but uses small or independent sellers to do ALL their work for THEIR profits. Of course – they have let in all the big boxes & Chinese merchants. But it is STILL the sellers who do ALL the work. Ebay is simply an advertising site, now. And a bully to boot.

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  • https://twitter.com/#!/kmadhav Sourabh Rana

    GOD knows or Ebay knows the full form of BHP ;) but, this is not first time that big brands are penalized by google animals. But, this is a really a great analysis by you RISHI.

    SEMRUSH tool rocks again .

  • sasikiran360

    Rishi, that is a good analysis. I think the only way to reach the ebay.co.uk/bhp/ pages is through the site search. For example, search ‘Nexus 4′ in the search box. In the left panel, scroll down to the ‘See also’ section and click on the links there which take you to the /bhp pages.

    But search engines do not type search queries. Google must have indexed them either through back links or site maps.

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  • Michael Ivanov

    Would have to agree with it being a manual penalty, such a large number of pages being removed suggests this wouldn’t have come as a surprise to eBay.

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  • http://www.maxtratechnologies.com/ MaxtraTechnologies

    deeply expalin Keep it up thanks

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  • Ben Peetermans

    Well written article, it was a pleasure to read. It just makes you think once more if Google is taking SEO a step too far.
    Sure, I can see where this BHP (black hat page as you call it) is 99% most likely entirely created for SEO purposes, but so what? Is that not the goal of every website, to create ways to rank better on SERPs?

    It’s almost as if you have to create a website existing out of 500+ word pages, ONLY using informational content, god forbid you sum up your services without a Wikipedia amount of explanation.

    Forget about linking to your friends website as well, too many non related low page rank links and you get penalized.

    Is Google making a website monopoly? Their way or the highway?

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  • Ima Pseudonym

    Great article. Two of the biggest egos on the web are now playing a game of chicken. Neither is known for admitting faults or backing away from poor choices. Should be interesting to watch.

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