This is a followup question from Podcast #257 Summer Q&A.
In that episode, the Guys were talking about the length and depth of the item description (the Body Copy) of a listing, and if that was relevant to search. The answer was no, that it didn't really help for search, yet could be helpful for adding in pertinent information that might be of interest to the potential buyer.
My question is: what about natural search?
You said that customers have the option of using the "Search Title and Description" in the advanced search options, I've tested a few times where I searched for some term I wouldn't expect to be in the title, and looked to see how many items came up without that term in the title. It does produce results.
So I'm wondering how many results are coming up from natural search (from the eBay database) in addition to the title and title+promoted listing. Does eBay index the description as well as the title. To index just the title seems like a particularly bad idea if the mission is to put relevant items in front of customers.
Also: what about the Google search bot? Would they not crawl the eBay site and pick up both titles and descriptions (and if so, why not?) because - having worked with their search people before, they want accurate item descriptions with no keyword spamming, and in their index, the items with the most relevant descriptions are going to be higher in search results than just name and image.
Thus my confusion at saying that the description copy is not relevant to eBay search: if eBay is not indexing that information, plus filtering out the **bleep** stuff about "Give me 5 stars" and customer service type words, they are "leaving money on the table."
