Ebay showing my listings in random wrong categories with mangled titles & descriptions

[patentearth]

I've been trying to figure out why my Ebay traffic and sales have been in steady decline for the past several weeks, and today I took a look to see what my Ebay listings are looking like in Google. What I discovered was both surprising and very frustrating, and I'm curious to know if any other sellers are seeing this.

I ran this search in google:

"patentearth" site:ebay.com

And in the first couple of pages of results I found pages like this: https://www.ebay.com/c/1633252074

This is a listing for a framed surfboard art print, and for some reason Ebay is showing it in the "Siberian Husky Collectibles" category. The listing title appears correctly on the page, but the title tag reads:

11 X 14 Print Red Siberian Husky Dog Surfer Dude Surf Surfboard Surfing Pop Art for sale online

W T F? "11 x 14" and "Red" appear to be partial snippets of randomly selected variations. The random Siberian Husky references are crammed in apparently because of the (incorrect) category association. And I have no idea where it's getting "Pop Art", that doesn't appear in the listing at all. Here's a screenshot showing the title tag and category:

The description is borked too, they just took random sentences from the description and mashed them together. And if you click "See All", instead of expanding to display the description it takes you to a separate page showing NOTHING BUT the description. It's like this page was designed to be confusing to both human users and search engines alike.

But when I open go to my inventory in My Ebay and open the listing, I get this page which shows the listing looking perfectly normal: https://www.ebay.com/itm/253048995288

And of course I checked the listing to double check the category assignments, and they are also correct. It shows this item is linked only to the "Art Prints" category. Here's a screenshot:

This is just one example, but I am finding several of these butchered & erroneous listings in Google's results. And I suspect that the fact that these garbage pages exist, and Google is finding and indexing these SEO nightmares, may at least partly explain why my traffic & sales are drying up.

Are any other sellers running into these listings? Can anybody on this discussion board that works for Ebay explain what is going on with these pages?

[southern*sweet*tea]

I've never seen a listing layout that looked like that

Not only is it weird, it's messed up.

[patentearth]

First time I've seen it too. Looking at other sellers listings in Google, I'm finding mixed results. Some sellers don't seem to have any of these new style listings, some do. However, they all seem to be in correct categories with accurate title tags and descriptions. I haven't managed to find any other sellers with scrambled listings like mine.

[chapeau-noir]

If you're on facebook I would post this with screenshots on eBay for Business on facebook  and ask them about it - that's completely fuxed up - I mean, it's not even close! 

[doug@ebay]

@patentearth please reach out https://www.ebay.com/help/home.

Customer Service can look into your account.

This also could be a browser issue. Please try a couple of different steps. Try a different browser, and clear cache and cookies on your main browser and see if this helps. Also please make sure you're using the latest version of your browser.

---

@patentearth wrote:

I've been trying to figure out why my Ebay traffic and sales have been in steady decline for the past several weeks, and today I took a look to see what my Ebay listings are looking like in Google. What I discovered was both surprising and very frustrating, and I'm curious to know if any other sellers are seeing this.

I ran this search in google:

"patentearth" site:ebay.com

And in the first couple of pages of results I found pages like this: https://www.ebay.com/c/1633252074

This is a listing for a framed surfboard art print, and for some reason Ebay is showing it in the "Siberian Husky Collectibles" category. The listing title appears correctly on the page, but the title tag reads:

11 X 14 Print Red Siberian Husky Dog Surfer Dude Surf Surfboard Surfing Pop Art for sale online

W T F? "11 x 14" and "Red" appear to be partial snippets of randomly selected variations. The random Siberian Husky references are crammed in apparently because of the (incorrect) category association. And I have no idea where it's getting "Pop Art", that doesn't appear in the listing at all. Here's a screenshot showing the title tag and category:

The description is borked too, they just took random sentences from the description and mashed them together. And if you click "See All", instead of expanding to display the description it takes you to a separate page showing NOTHING BUT the description. It's like this page was designed to be confusing to both human users and search engines alike.

But when I open go to my inventory in My Ebay and open the listing, I get this page which shows the listing looking perfectly normal: https://www.ebay.com/itm/253048995288

And of course I checked the listing to double check the category assignments, and they are also correct. It shows this item is linked only to the "Art Prints" category. Here's a screenshot:

This is just one example, but I am finding several of these butchered & erroneous listings in Google's results. And I suspect that the fact that these garbage pages exist, and Google is finding and indexing these SEO nightmares, may at least partly explain why my traffic & sales are drying up.

Are any other sellers running into these listings? Can anybody on this discussion board that works for Ebay explain what is going on with these pages?

---

[wesk_36]

I didn't get those results on google, but I did get results for all of your stores on various venues, as well as your website. (on DuckDuckGo)

I received "0" results in the ebay "Siberian Husky Collectibles" category even though the mangled google result that you referenced has that listed.

You have some great stuff and I already found a couple of presents to order!

[autopiacarcare]

Wow, thank you for posting this @patentearth .  I did the same thing and found a few of our listings that are displaying strangely as well.  It looks to me like it may be happening when Google is linking to what appears to be an eBay catalog page rather than your direct listing/item number.

I noticed that the ones I see it on for us, the link is ebay.com/c/"number"  - where that number is not the item number vs. search results in Google that link directly to the listing/item number.

Here are screenshots of what that wax looks like if you click through that result on Google to the catalog page vs what it looks like if you go directly to that listing via item number.  You can see the catalog page shows it in Home & Garden>Household & Cleaning Supplies>Household Cleaning Products whereas the actual listing page correctly shows it in eBay Motors>Automotive Tools & Supplies>Automotive Care & Detailing>Waxes & Polishes

doug@ebayplease report this to the appropriate teams and add us to the list of affected sellers.

[autopiacarcare]

@patentearth- just to the confirm the theory, I searched in Chrome for your items and am consistently seeing that results which show a direct link to your listing seem to be OK, but results that link to a ebay.com/c/"number" page are not showing correct categories.  Item 252352723323 for example shows in Art & Craft Supplies>Scrapbooking & Paper Craft Supplies>Paper Craft Supplies>Card Making Supplies  from the google link that leads to a catalog page vs Art>Art Posters on your actual listing.

[patentearth]

@wesk_36 yeah I used "site:ebay.com" in my search so that it would only return results from Ebay. My products don't actually show up in any of the wrong categories through Ebay's search, I'm only finding them through Google. The way to tell the difference is by looking at the URL in Google's results - if the URL has "/c/" instead of "/itm/" then it's a potential problem listing.

Also, thanks! Glad you like our stuff 🙂

[patentearth]

@autopiacarcare thanks for confirming. Yes, I've also observed that links with "/itm/" are fine, but links with "/c/" tend to have problems. I wasn't even aware that Ebay had separate "catalog" pages like these. Seems like a bad idea SEO wise (dupe content).

Also thanks for letting us know that you are seeing the same problems with your listings. I checked several other sellers at random and couldn't find any obvious mis-categorizations and was starting to think it was just me. I wonder how many other sellers are affected.

[patentearth]

doug@ebay doug@ebay I will run it by support but it appears that I am not the only seller affected by this. And it definitely is not a browser issue.

[autopiacarcare]

Just to make things more interesting - I did a google search for p21s concours carnauba ebay

I found a different "/c/" url that is the same item but showing in the Sports Trading Card category and a "/p/" url that shows the correct car care category but is using a different title than our listing and a different brand than what we have in the item specifics of our listing.

I'm starting to think this is related to some of the item specifics/category changes that have been causing so many other issues.

[patentearth]

@autopiacarcare Good find. So far I haven't seen any "/p/" pages or multiple "/c/" pages for the listing in my case.

These pages are very concerning. Obviously it's a problem to have so many product pages with incorrect information.

I can also say from experience that creating runaway duplicate content like this is a great way to tank a website's search placement. How has your Ebay traffic been the past few weeks? Mine has declined quite a bit.

[autopiacarcare]

---

@patentearth wrote:
@autopiacarcareGood find. So far I haven't seen any "/p/" pages or multiple "/c/" pages for the listing in my case.

These pages are very concerning. Obviously it's a problem to have so many product pages with incorrect information.

I can also say from experience that creating runaway duplicate content like this is a great way to tank a website's search placement. How has your Ebay traffic been the past few weeks? Mine has declined quite a bit.

---

@patentearth- our traffic has been down the past few weeks, but it would be hard to say how much of that is due to technical issues like this.  This time of year tends to be when we start to see things slow down for a bit any way because people aren't so gung-ho about washing/waxing/detailing their cars once the temperatures start to drop in certain parts of the country.  Usually we'll get a gift giving bump from cyber week through the holidays and then it will really pick back up in the Spring, but we'll see if that trends holds this year.

[autopiacarcare]

---

@patentearth wrote:

doug@ebay doug@ebay I will run it by support but it appears that I am not the only seller affected by this. And it definitely is not a browser issue.

---

I've been playing around with google searches for random items in multiple browsers, rather than searching for a specific seller.  I hover over the results to see the URL and any of them that are "/c/" URLs seem to be affected by this issue.  I have seen it for multiple sellers and items in various categories, so it definitely isn't a browser issue and it doesn't even appear to be specific to particular sellers or products.

The only things I see in common are that they are "/c" URLS and the "wrong" categories so far seem to be ones I believe were affected by the category and item specifics changes from October 15th - mostly I am seeing Home & Garden, Collectibles, and Toys.