How Google SEO Changes Hurt Ebay's Quarterly Revenues

Posted by Hadraj Youssef On Thursday, July 24, 2014 0 Comments
By Nazar Bryant


If you have been watching the news on eBay, you probably have heard that although they had nearly reached their projections for their second quarter earnings, roughly $4.37 billion, they fell short because of algorithm changes made by Google. Apparently, Google decided to penalize eBay because of marketing tactics that it was using, not so much the result of the Google panda algorithm which looks for thin sites or pages that have less than meaningful content.



CFO Bob Swan stated that search engine positioning was a major factor in regard to less traffic to eBay's core market places. It was a challenging quarter because of lower conversions and slower active buyer growth.

As a result, eBay has decided to reengage existing clientele, as well as bring in new customers, using strategies including coupon in, increased market spending and advertising, and providing more seller incentives. The problem seems to be solely based upon tactics that are not allowed by Google, which forced them to penalize eBay in some way. Hopefully these changes will take effect quickly as third-quarter earnings need to be higher to compensate for the previous quarter.

Once you have a good look at what Google does to SEO and how it harms businesses like eBay, you can really start to see that it's a legitimate concern. Hopefully Google will learn to start working at this and stop hurting people in the process. In the quest to stop people from abusing the system, it's starting to hurt those that don't.

Second-quarter earnings were supposed to be $4.37 billion which is a sizable chunk of change, but it was shy several million dollars of the expected goal. Is it possible that Google actually penalized them specifically, targeting all of eBay's pages that are listed on Google?

Although eBay has stated that it will advertise more with Google, it has never said that Google Adwords was a viable form of generating revenue. In fact, it is blatantly stated that it doesn't work, especially for the name brand products that are offered on the online auction giant. This should prove to be interesting over the next few months as Google and eBay hash things out. With quarterly earnings down, they will have to make a significant comeback to balance their books. We shall see what happens the third quarter of 2014.




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