AuctionBytes checked in with Matt Ackley, eBay's Vice President of International Marketing and Advertising, to learn what steps eBay takes to ensure that sellers' product listings appear in Google search results and in Google Product Search.
eBay has been sending product listings to Google since 2005, according to Matt, and eBay has a group of people that works closely with Google to make sure it gets all of eBay's content.
eBay ensures that its pages conform to Google policies and are set up such that Google can crawl the site. There are challenges, however - eBay's large size and dynamic nature make it difficult for search engines to crawl the entire site. The unstructured nature of eBay listings presents another challenge - eBay is not a fixed product catalog from which sellers select when listing their items.
In 2005, eBay came up with an early feed mechanism to feed View Item pages to Google's core index using a site-maps feed. Google has a number of different indexes, and over the years the process of providing feeds to Google has evolved. Currently eBay continues to provide the site-maps feed of the View Items pages for all countries and for all formats. eBay also now provides a feed to Google Base.
eBay uses the Google Base API to submit the tens of millions of products to Google on a daily basis as they come live on eBay. "We try to send them every single item as it comes on to the site. What they do with it is up to them, that's a lot of data that we're sending them," Matt said, explaining that eBay does not have much control over how many of the listings actually make it into the Base. eBay talks daily or weekly to Google on any number of things. "Engineers talk to engineers, product managers talk to product managers, and business people talk to business people."
AuctionBytes had recently observed that eBay was stripping out individual product descriptions, replacing them with generic messages. Matt said eBay did that at the request of Google, and explained why. Google uses a snippet of the product descriptions, but on eBay, they contain HTML, CSS, javascript, Vendio sliders, etc. This was a problem when feeding it to Google's "description" attribute field. So, Matt explained, eBay created generic descriptions to make it more manageable.
In addition, Google introduced a new Product Plus Box. The Product Plus Box is in beta, and eBay is one of Google's early partners, according to Matt. The HTML in eBay product descriptions caused a big red "x" to appear in the Plus Box expansion box, another reason eBay changed the description field in the feed it sends to Google Base.
Nevertheless, Google usually crawls the View Item pages to pick up the product description, which they use in their relevancy algorithm if they deem that necessary. Matt said the change to the description field is a first pass, and eBay will continue to tune and iterate the feed over time.
How can sellers educate themselves on how to optimize their own listings for search engines? Matt said eBay has taught classes at eBay Live conferences and has held "Brown Bag Lunches" on message boards to teach sellers. In addition, eBay Stores has implemented features to improve their Search Engine Optimization standing (SEO). eBay does a lot of the SEO work on behalf of the seller, and Matt described the process of optimizing eBay for search engines as both an art and a science.
eBay provides information on Search Engine Optimization in the eBay Learning Center where sellers can learn more about SEO.
Comment on the AuctionBytes Blog
