Dr Pete over at Moz just covered some interesting ground over Ebay.coms ranking losses on a post titled Panda 4.0, Payday Loan 2.0 & eBay’s Very Bad Day.

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Now unless you have access to the keywords that Moz tracks, or your own inventory of regularly tracked keywords, you have to take Dr Pete’s word for it when he notes down keywords that eBay lost out on. However, there are alternative ways of understanding how to deconstruct such a major hit, and one of them is by the use of SEMrush’s Organic Positions drill down.

So lets see what SEMrush shows us:

As you can see, SEMrush recorded a dramatically higher volume of lost keywords vs the keywords gained. So this supports the theory that Ebay.com took a major hit.

By clicking on the lost keyword bar, I can extract the full list of keywords SEMrush say a decline in rankings for eBay.com:

Now, if you search for “Black mens jumpsuit” eBay seems to have gone https://www.google.com/search?q=black+mens+jumpsuit&oq=black+mens+jumpsuit&pws=0

What’s more interesting to me, is that I often see the dot com version in UK serps for long tail queries. It seems that this update or whatever it was, has hurt the dot com in UK serps:

One of the lost keywords was https://www.google.co.uk/#q=iphone+5+cases And a search in the UK indicates the fall from the top 10. This is a heavy search term keyword, so you can assume its loss from the top 10 could significantly impact traffic and sales. However at position 9, maybe the loss wasn’t as significant. But how do I know that the data is correct?

Well, you can check historical search engine result pages using SEMrush, so I dug into the March SERPs for the phrase “iphone 5 cases”:

Wait, hold on, is that the .co.uk with sitelinks? Interesting. But not what I was looking for.

Ah, there you go, position 9 as recorded, it’s the .com. So ebay had both the .co.uk and .com versions of that page indexed and ranking. So maybe the loss in the traffic isn’t so bad, since the UK page is still there… right?

Actually no. This is todays screenshot:

So eBay has not only lost the .com ranking in the UK serps, its lost its .co.uk rankings too. Lets see what SEMrush says:

Looks like ebay uk hasn’t had a great week either then.

Well this is getting interesting. Lets dig a bit deeper.

As Dr Pete highlights, Some of the losses he tracked were on category pages such as /www.ebay.com/ bhp / led-fiber-optic-christmas-tree

In my example, the loss was www.ebay.co.uk/ bhp/ iphone-5-case

Can you see the “bhp” in the URL?

The interesting thing about THAT url is that a normal user journey will NOT take you to it. I.e, if I open up eBay.co.uk:

The actual URL to the computer category is http://www.ebay.co.uk/electronics/mobile-home-phone which then redirects to : http://www.ebay.co.uk/rpp/mobile-home-phone:

That url should be: http://www.ebay.co.uk/sch/Cases-Covers-/20349/i.html

After this, you have to use facets to get deeper.

You can t try it whichever way you like, I couldn’t see how a non google referred user gets to that “bhp” page. Links to it might be buried deep in eBays mammoth site somewhere, but essentially these “category” pages aren’t real category pages, but pages created for search engines, and users alike as target starting pages.

Edit: Dan from Screaming Frog had some additional observations:

@rishil /bhp/ pages are at the bottom of the facet on sub cats, in the ‘see also’ section. Example – http://t.co/GLLe17DEnl — Dan Sharp (@screamingfrog) May 21, 2014

@rishil No probs. Interesting once you’re on those /bhp/ pages, how they link to more, ‘cheap laptops’ – http://t.co/VUVVf4vIFZ links to a — Dan Sharp (@screamingfrog) May 21, 2014

I have seen them before and analysed them and even joked “BHP” stands for “Black Hat Pages”, but I would like to stress, I DON’T think that there was anything wrong in the way the site created and optimised these for the serps. It was pretty clever actually, but I think it WAS overdone.

BHP Pages an Issue

So do I think these category pages are part of the problem?

Using SEMrush’s filter functions, you can actually see that of the 120K plus pages that lost rankings, nearly 90K were those with “BHP” in the URLs:

Infact, SEMrush hasn’t completed its scan, but here are keywords it still thinks that eBay ranks for, which have “bhp” in the URL: http://www.semrush.com/uk/info/ebay.co.uk+(by+organic)?filter=%2B%7CUr%7CCo%7Cbhp&page=1 (you need pro account to access screenshot below):

But here are some examples for those without Pro access:

star trek uniform

ryobi parts

iron man mask

ping i20 irons

slipknot masks

nitro rc cars

oompa loompa costume

honda c90

koi carp for sale

cheap xbox 360 games

motorola gleam

gameboy advance sp

decoupage paper

disney dvd collection

sticker bomb

deadpool costume

scart to hdmi cable

nokia 6310i

beach chairs

wooden activity cube

A cursory check indicates that majority of these no longer rank. And that indicates how you could carry out some simple audits on rank losses using JUST SEMrush. For the full SEMrush Guide, follow this link. Set up a FREE SEMrush account to test their tool Click Here!

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