Google Penalizes Its 2nd biggest PLA’s Customer (eBay): Panda 4.0

On May 20, 2014, Google began rolling out their Panda 4.0 update, which is designed to penalize poor content websites. This update generated both “winners” who have moved up in Google rankings and “losers” who have dropped down in ranking. According to the initial winners and loser charts of Searchmetrics, eBay is one of the biggest losers and has lost a tremendous amount of traffic from Google, much of it from the ebay.com/bhp/ area of its site. The other big losers are ask.com, starpuls.com, and biography.com.

Larry Kim, Founder of Wordstream, estimates that eBay has lost 80% of its organic traffic and ranking after rolling out of Google’s new Panda algorithm and the Payday Loan 2.0 update. Making bad condition to worse, eBay had to ask all its users to change their passwords after a database hack. Peter Meyers, who writes for the Moz Blog, founded that eBay’s share of top 10 Google rankings across a range of search results had collapsed in the past couple of days:

Why eBay has been penalized by Google?

eBay has been Google’s second-biggest customer for its paid shopping “product listing ads” (PLAs) and it had pretty good “organic” search ranking, previously. So, why it has been penalized by Google? Few reasons are mentioned below:

• Larry Kim, Founder of Wordstream, agrees that bad SEO practices of eBay are responsible for this poor ranking. He also pointed out that eBay’s poorly managed campaigns and atrocious misuse of AdWords features like Dynamic Keyword Insertion can be the main reasons.
• Larry Kim also founded that pages on eBay has very little content (thin content), like

The actual product listing pages consistently have three features:

• eBay’s own, internal search results
• Ads – text ads, display ads and PLAs
• Internal links to other product results pages

In addition to this, eBay is also employing aggressive internal linking on super-long-tail keywords in its footers:

• According to Refugeeks, Google’s latest update Panda 4.0 penalized eBay’s category pages that it had created especially for search-engines. It also said that some of eBay’s category pages weren’t “real” category pages, but rather, pages created solely for search engines

With penalizing one of its biggest customers, do you think Google will ever mercy any site with spam? Will eBay take action against Google? Will Google return the site again on top position in organic search claiming it was a bug? What are your speculations? Share your comments with us.