ga('require', 'GTM-TWVPBWV'); Let's talk SEO: May 2014

Monday 26 May 2014

ebay- what hit the website, Google Panda 4 or something else?

Google Panda 4.0 hit many websites and at the same time ebay got a hit wherein some of its webpages "disappeared" from Google search.
Google Panda 4.0 and Payday loans 2.0 were released last week. Panda 4.0 said to affect different languages to different extents and it affected around 7.5% of English results.
Last June, Google rolled out another type of update that says to fight with "very spammy queries" and the spammy queries were like, payday loans, insurance, accident etc. etc. The new version was rolled along with Panda 4.0 and said to hurt 0.2% English queries and queries of different languages too.


While, ebay has nothing to do with payday loans (but of-course people waited for payday to buy stuff from ebay), many of its webpages were out of Google's search.
Initially it was thought that Panda 4.0 has done this harm to ebay but sooner the real reason came out--it was a manual penalty posed on website; though neither Google or ebay has confirmed about the same.
It is thought to be a manual hit because:

  • If it would be a Panda hit then complete website should vanish from Google search.
  • Only pages that contained "bhp" in their URL are not there in Google search.
  • Such pages were actually door way pages---which is no no thing for Google.
People are waiting for either of the parties to speak on this. Let's wait for the actual reason.
Original source: http://recode.net/2014/05/23/yes-google-punished-ebay-for-bad-seo-practices-but-it-wasnt-part-of-panda-update/