Potential cause behind lost views--but all is not lost (insight from webmaster)

[atomicgirl2022]

So, in 2022 I was thinking of going back to eBay to start selling again after microstock dried up completely for me. This is why I came to the forums, to get a feel for how things were going. Then I read about how so many people had lost views suddenly in May.

I know what some of you are going to say. Yes, the pandemic and struggling economy definitely has something to do with this. However, I believe people's suspicions that there's also a technical factor at hand here. Given my history with affiliate marketing, I think I know what happened.

In reading multiple forum posts, I came across comments about eBay having gotten rid of bots. At some point, someone mentioned Google potentially playing a part, and that's when the alarm bells went off. 

The reason why is that once upon a time during the Jurassic Period, I was a full-fledged affiliate marketer. Part of being an affiliate marketer was always being aware of what the search engines were up to all the time, especially Google. In case you don't know, since 2011, Google has been rolling out these infamous updates called "Panda," which will knock back or even wipe out the views of popular websites overnight.

It doesn't matter how big the sites are or whether they've always been in good standing, either. For example, About.com disappeared not after Google rolled out one of the first Pandas, and huge sites like WiseGeek and others had their views cut by half.

When the first of a wave of Panda updates first started rolling out, I was at Squidoo. The site had been red-flagged by Google but was warned in advance to fix some of its problems or risk being penalized. Squidoo complied but was slammed eventually and died a year later.

My gut instinct is that this is what happened with eBay recently. Bots were getting out of control and Google warned eBay about them. It said, "Get rid of them or we will severely wipe you out." eBay complied, but lost traffic anyway--not because it was dinged in visibility but because it lost the benefit of those bots boosting views in Google. 

I wanted to make sure if my theories weren't just me speculating out of my tookus, so I started looking at SEO forums reacting to the latest Google updates in 2022. Everyone is pointing to the week of May 18th when everything went south. Webmasters are reporting that their sites have lost tons of visitors, and that junk sites like Pinterest and Quora are now dominating Google's searches (read reactions here: Google May 2022 Core Update Is Live - Here Is What We Are Seeing Early On (seroundtable.com)

Besides the recent Google update potentially throwing the monkey wrench in the gear words, I also realized the unfortunate fact that newer generation of shoppers are no longer looking to Google to search for stuff to buy or even do comparison shopping. They are going to Pinterest, Tik Tok, etc. or directly to places like Etsy.

Now, I know this all sounds very bleak, but there is light at the end of the tunnel. Maybe I'm hopeful because of where I live. I'm from NYC and even in a place as big as this, people are still marketing their services the old-fashioned way--fliers, postcards and business cards. Remember that you don't have to spend an arm and a leg to print something up and that maybe you can toss a few in a package for a customer to freely hand over to friends and family. Just because we are living in the digital age doesn't mean we still can't do things old school. 

[randyshotrods]

At this point that's a better explanation of what might have happened than what ebay has given us,  which is nothing.  So I guess guys who sell real specialty stuff like me are just going to get hosed by this. We provide an excellent service and product, and ebay does as little as they have to for us.  Otherwise they would have come clean on this.  

Maybe they could even offer a promotion like some ebay bucks.  I think it's been atleast a year since they offered me any, when they used to be given for everything we purchased  and special promos of up to 5% on certain days and items.  

Typical corporate idea of trying to not lose a single dime, when they could get a huge boost ins sales at a slightly less commission and actually make more money.  What do I know though.  I don't have a fancy degree to tell me this,  just good common sense and life experience. 

Thanks for proposing this.  It does make alot of sense. 

[gosimus]

@atomicgirl2022 

< junk sites like Pinterest ... are now dominating Google's searches >   

I've noticed that!  Lately, no matter what I search for on google, the results seem always to be teeming with tons of Pinterest lists.  I wondered what was going on, and now I know.  Thanks, and many thanks for breaking your post into manageable paragraphs.  Lots of members would have posted that in one gigantic clump of words. 

[atomicgirl2022]

@randyshotrods : I understand the frustration you are feeling right now, but please don't see yourself as being hosed. We are in a new normal with giants like Google, Amazon, Pinterest, etc. dominating the digital landscape. In the new normal, we will just have to come up with new strategies to attract attention.

My gut instinct, too, is that the pendulum will turn again in the other direction as Google users become disgruntled at seeing the same handful of sites (Amazon, Etsy, etc.) dominating every shopping query, especially ones that are pushing Chinese sellers. I can also potentially see someone filing a complaint with the FTC.

[5594shelleys]

I wanted to make sure if my theories weren't just me speculating out of my tookus, so I started looking at SEO forums reacting to the latest Google updates in 2022. Everyone is pointing to the week of May 18th when everything went south. Webmasters are reporting that their sites have lost tons of visitors, and that junk sites like Pinterest and Quora are now dominating Google's searches (read reactions here: Google May 2022 Core Update Is Live - Here Is What We Are Seeing Early On (seroundtable.com)

I followed the link, read the comments, and bingo, you are absolutely correct re the activities. Thank you.

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-may-2022-core-update-33482.html

"Forum discussion at Twitter, WebmasterWorld, Black Hat World, Local Search Forum and Google Webmaster Help"

[atomicgirl2022]

@gosimus : Glad I could help give insight into all this. Maybe enough Google users will get angry and disgusted enough with Pinterest and all these other sites that are being shoved down their throats that the algorithm will get tweaked back again in a future update. It remains to be seen...

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[randyshotrods]

Problem is while I'm waiting for the pendulum to swing back, all the rare unusual stuff I bought and paid a premium for has sold for low bids. It's gone and I won't have it again to sell. 

[chapeau-noir]

Google has not only rolled out several large core algorithm changes in the last few years (as well as the recent one cited above), but they've also been changing their search since the first massive reorganisation in the mid-2010s (where eBay got in Google's naughty book for having too much thin content).  Sites can go down in ranking without their doing anything wrong in particular.

I do some old school (business cards as tags) as well as new school (social media advertising), and think the mix is good.  I get repeat business which also helps.

And I'm also tired of Pinterest barfing all over search results, and I actually *use* Pinterest.

[hk-resale]

Really appreciate the time and detail you go into in your posting. I worked as a software engineer for 14 years on internal & external facing web apps. 

The change eBay made was in regards to how they count views.

They have not indicated that they blocked bots from indexing the site. They indicated that they are no longer counting them as a valid view.

Likely they either use some sort of behavior based algorithm to determine if a visitor is a bot vs a real person. Or it could be looking at user agent strings or blocks of IP addresses.

Having said the above we don't truly understand how they are now determining a valid view. But one thing seems certain, it appears to have affected sales for many sellers. We are one of the sellers affected and it's been rough. We've had some good days, but we're down between 15 & 20%. 

[chapeau-noir]

You bring up a good point about determining what is a 'bot view' and what is an organic view.  How, actually, does eBay determine this?  Some of these procedures can be pretty crude.

[fashunu4eeuh]

Hmmm, interesting. 

Been here long enough to remember when Google apparently penalized eBay for its alleged improper optimization practices. So in 2014, Google lowered the boom on eBay and practically overnight, eBay pages were no longer given priority or inclusion in Search results. The details are a little foggy now, but i checked and found reporting that as much as 80% of eBay’s prime rankings was lost. Some said it was Panda, some said it was a “manual action” event by Google. Whatever it was, it hurt sales and traffic to eBay.

[hk-resale]

That's an important question. I don't really know how they did it. And likely their method would be considered proprietaty and they would not be able to divulge it (for those looking to exploit it). 

One hypothesis we've been tossing around is that the drop in sales for many sellers is related to the change in view counts.

We've all learned that click through rate is important as it shows that our listing is well crafted.

And from my understanding it's simple math impressions / views = click through rate. If the denominator gets smaller while the numerator stays they same then click through rate decreases.

If bots are crawling the site using a common method (headless browsers) then their actions could be counting as an impression but not as a views (due to the change in calculation). 

If your listings have poor click through rate then the platform would likely surpress your listing (don't want to waste visits by showing them poorly performing listings).

Now we have not done any work to test the above hypothesis, but it may have some merit. 

[atomicgirl2022]

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@fashunu4eeuh wrote:

Some said it was Panda, some said it was a “manual action” event by Google. Whatever it was, it hurt sales and traffic to eBay.

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Interesting that you brought this up ("manual action"), because a controversial topic came up on a different forum regarding all this. Apparently, Google is also hiring thousands of people from India and The Philippines to manually ding or boost sites. There is also a lot of other hinky stuff going on, tons of AI-generated content being boosted at the expense of quality listings.

Here's some more links to show how deep the rabbithole is getting:

Link 1: Google Updates and SERP Changes - March 2022 - Google SEO News and Discussion forum at WebmasterWorl...

Link 2: Google Updates and SERP Changes - April 2022 - Google SEO News and Discussion forum at WebmasterWorl...

Link 3: Google Updates and SERP Changes - May 2022 - Google SEO News and Discussion forum at WebmasterWorld ...

[dy42963]

I google for items, and eBay is, for most items that I tried , right at the top of the search.

My items are there.

Been on time away off, and on  some of the month.

My external views are consistently there all month.

[ladyindecadence]

I believe you have hit the nail on the head, as impressions have not declined but page views have this now changes the equation much more in favor of hot items and long tail specialty items get lost in a sea of search results.