Lecture
eBay is a separate story, a brand that is well-known not only abroad, but also in Russia. But we will not talk about shopping 
because we have a SEO Blog , so let's talk about promoting this resource directly with the head of the SEO team.
Denis Goadegebour, also known as DennisG, is the head of the eBay SEO team.
After writing a few posts on our forums, I asked him about a full SEO interview.
As a result, we received 12 pages of SEO business recommendations, methods, tips that will be useful for anyone.
After I got a degree in economics from the University of Amsterdam, I joined eBay in April 2002. I originally worked for the eBay marketing team of the Netherlands and Belgium, it was 5 months before eBay acquired iBazar, which became very popular in a number of European countries.
iBazar was designed for traditional methods of promotion: television, radio and the press. eBay, on the other hand, spent most of its budget on receiving users from online advertising and other methods. So, I was hired second on the promotion on the Internet.
While I was working on eBay.nl, my responsibilities included maintaining links with Yahoo and MSN, buying several important keywords on Google when he came to Holland, and I also negotiated the acquisition of the largest site in the Netherlands - marktplaats.nl.
In order to be more confident in communicating with local developers, I started learning programming languages. Naturally, HTML was the first of them and his knowledge helped me a lot with working with programmers.
However, all knowledge in HTML is quickly forgotten, if not used. So I started writing my own sites. Since I was very interested in internet promotion, I was definitely caught up with the idea of getting traffic through SEO. I no longer wanted to invest money in these projects, but began to spend all my time on extracting traffic. And SEO was the best method to get it.
Inside eBay you have the opportunity to choose your path. If you want to go to another department, you must prove that you deserve it. After acquiring Marktplaats.nl, I started optimizing this site for search engines. Marktplaats.nl had its own project promotion team, which did not interfere with eBay.nl, as it was only part of a huge platform.
In 2004, I was invited to eBay College for Internet Marketing, where I met my manager in the USA. A year later, I had a chance to move to San Jose, and I was engaged in coordinating global projects for receiving natural traffic. At this time, several local teams worked on this, but we needed more practice and information for their development.
Now, I work in the main team in San Jose, and we are responsible for all the natural traffic of all eBay projects. We are engaged in consulting related sites and PayPal, when necessary. We also have a very good relationship with the SEO teams of the projects Shopping.com and Stubhub.
Over the past three years I have been dealing with SEO with Skype, StumbleUpon, Rent and half.com. It was very useful and exciting to deal with different SEO approaches of various projects. I got a huge SEO experience.
Many people recognized my knowledge of SEO. Among them were such famous as Danny Sullivan, Vanessa Fox or Michael Gray. Thank you all!
One of the colleagues who constantly supported me for a long time was Alex Schultz. Alex is a very clever and talented person who has a lot of knowledge in internet marketing. I will be happy to work with him in any team and at any time!
I used my sites to conduct small experiments and test new methods. Every day I learn something new about SEO from other people. The most important thing in this business is not to focus on one source of traffic, you should be versatile.
It is very important to think everything in advance when you work with large sites. A site like eBay can be compared to a huge tanker at sea. If you can quickly make changes to small sites, then eBay needs a complex of complex measures. Since eBay was the most attractive place for fraudsters in the past, huge measures were taken to improve security.
To work more effectively with corporate sites, you need extra knowledge and skills. If you can rely only on your knowledge and skills when working with small sites, in large organizations you always need the help of managers and analysts. And the ability to work with your team is the success in accomplishing the tasks set and the further development of the project.
Sometimes, when you are not involved in a project, it is very difficult to identify all the mistakes and good luck in SEO. You can never correct all the mistakes made in a large team.
I did a lot to draw attention to SEO among the company. During the emergence of several major products, it was SEO action that led to success.
When you are so useful to the company, you can make a very serious leap up. And you can become useful not only in SEO, but also you can give some useful tips in other branches of the company. The ability to cope with difficult problems is the key to career growth.
The most common method is to build a reference mass. Even links in nofollow will help in promoting a small online business. SEO users have concentrated so much on links as a tool for advancing search engine output that they completely forgot about the main task of links. The link connects the two documents together, to improve navigation for users.
Links are good for getting traffic. The more links - the more traffic. Early last year, I received a link from Valleywag to my blog. After analyzing the sources of traffic for 2009, it turned out that this link is the second significant source of traffic for my blog!
Also, think about StumbleUpon. Stumbleupon can still be a good source of traffic if your pages are placed in the right categories. And I constantly speak about it to beginners. There are many articles about traffic from Stumbleupon.
I constantly repeat that Stumbleupon is a gift that continues to delight. Below is the statistics of one of my sites, where you can see about traffic jumps once a month from Stumbleupon. Therefore, I can say that this resource will help you to be less dependent on search traffic.
I do not think SEO bloggers are too superstitious. This is your conclusion, since you see changes in the algorithm and immediately see how this affects your website traffic. Each site experiences different changes, because each site has a different reference weight, content or structure.
Therefore, you immediately announce all the changes in the algorithms and how they affected your site. I can advise the bloggers to regularly ask questions to readers about your site. After all, the opinion of people from outside can open up new moments, etc.
When radical changes occur in the algorithms, we do not notice this. This is all because one page can lose its traffic, and another will start bringing. The same can happen with keywords. The larger the site, the less it is affected by the changes.
Now, about large sites like eBay. Whatever changes were, major sites will continue to develop. Ebay invests huge resources in content, products, etc. - it is constantly evolving and therefore it will always have natural search traffic.
Work on such a site usually means: different teams, work on different parts of the site. Someone constantly comes to these commands, someone leaves. Without SEO knowledge you will always be behind the whole team and will not cope with the requirements.
As an SEO company team, we are constantly promoting it, making new connections with new people and looking for projects that can harm the company and try to buy the project.
The worst thing about working for a large company is the loss of a company's goals and how SEO can help bring it closer to those goals. Carried away by work, the main thing is to keep everything under control, to be above everything. This state is called in Europe - Fingerspitzengefuhl - Subtle instinct.
After all this, all technical issues are a matter of a systematic approach to them.
Yes, most recently, focusing on the speed of loading the site, we saw an increase in natural traffic. I was afraid of this update, as there was some debate three years ago. Now, the download speed of the site is becoming increasingly important in the ranking of the site. Projects that significantly increase the speed of site loading can become a burden in 2010.
Traffic. Traffic and conversion.
I do not believe that the ranking will tell you a lot, because it changes depending on the data center, personal search or IP targeting. Most Ebay traffic is single requests. And the number of such requests is so large that it is unlikely we will be able to track the position of each of them. But sometimes I check rankings using your rank checker, but only from home IP, not from corporate IP.
It is not easy to evaluate what affects the traffic of a small site after the changes, but the changes are immediately visible. And for a huge site it is much more difficult to define both. Even the tests of my personal site cannot be compared with the results of eBay.
This is exactly the moment when experience and some instructions of search engines come in handy. Speaking about the long-term approach, we do not want to lose any position or traffic.
Yes, there is a huge difference between paid and natural search traffic. From the business side, paid traffic is better: after paying a certain amount of money today, you will see the result of sales tomorrow.
SEO is always very difficult to predict the return on investment. And therefore, I had to argue more than once within the company. If it’s easier for one team to invest a couple of millions in selling a product tomorrow, I hope for long-term sales using SEO.
With the economic crisis, paid search traffic budgets have been significantly cut. As can be seen from Google data, only 3% of the company's growth comes from paid search traffic. Despite this, I felt a significant increase in SEO investing. I had a huge number of candidates for new places in our SEO team, where SEO specialists were very much appreciated.
The more large and small companies will learn about the power of SEO: top rankings, high-end promotion, etc., the more companies are willing to invest in SEO. It seems that there is nothing new here, but every year such companies become more and more, and there are not so many good specialists.
Some small companies will consult with specialists and try to fulfill their recommendations on their own, and large companies may hire such specialists or even a team. Every year it can be seen more and more clearly.
Not. This can be done on small sites, but not on a large site. And even if you can do the test, you need to remember that 1.5 million people depend on eBay - their sales and income. We try to provide the best service to know that it will bring people success. Our main task is to deliver traffic to their belongings.
Now, this does not mean that we test nothing at all. We have several ideas that we are testing and it’s good that the Vice President understands how important innovations are. We have the freedom to act on testing innovations. Work on this will pay for itself after putting them into operation.
One of the test projects, New-Pulse, was intended to be hosted by blogs like Gizmodo and Engadget to cover new products for site visitors, and we will know better what users need.
A little joke with New-Pulse: I found an active community, making socks (what they do in October) and called themselves Socktoberfest. Images of socks were posted on Flickr.
Depending on what you mean by changes in strategy. If we want to achieve something from a certain category, then the traffic can start to grow immediately thanks to PR methods. If you understand a change in a product as a strategy, then traffic may fall before growth begins.
Therefore, the team of natural search traffic has expanded over the past months. There are so many changes in products and projects that we have to strengthen teams accordingly.
The answer to your question is yes, it happened. In 2009, we changed the eBay site URL structure. We started using canonical URL tags and expect to see results in a few months.
Our community of sellers is very smart in getting traffic to their stuff. Some are very enterprising and could become very good optimizers.
If you are a seller on eBay and you want to become successful, you will make all the SEO recommendations. Keyword research, headlines, description quality, good pictures, etc.
However, their success also depends on the tools that eBay offers to retailers. Customizable categories, large images, store descriptions at the top of the page, a standard page optimization tool, etc.
Moreover, eBay has a team of top sellers. One of my colleagues is working on this right now. They modify the algorithm of such a script and improve the compilation of the best sellers.
Next year, we are going to conduct training seminars for this SEO team in Salt Lake City. While we are there, we will interview customer service representatives to find out how they can help the merchant community.
We never recommended buying search traffic to our sellers. For the most part, because there is a restriction on the double use of the service in search engines. since we sometimes also use such paid campaigns, for example, this was done for the PS section of platforms.
I saw examples of how sellers successfully promoted their product pages on their blogs. They even make money on eBay affiliate network traffic.
This year, we also restarted the eBay keyword purchase program. Sellers will be able to get more traffic using Adcommerce. In Adcommerce, merchants can set bids for their keywords to be shown in the issuance.
Так как огромное количество контента действительно находится в глубине сайта, улучшение навигации привлекло наше основное внимание.
Мы вложили не мало усилий в улучшение технологии и анализа фида. Протокол карты сайта здесь играет особую роль. С такой часто обновляющейся информацией как на eBay вы можете обновлять сайтмапы (карты сайта) постоянно.
Однако, усилия на получение информации из базы данных, создание карты сайта и т. д. занимает не малое количество времени. Мы проделали не малую работу над улучшением эффективности нашего фида. Мы воспользовались моделированием больших баз данных , что стало главной задачей. Как крупная компания, мы постоянно работаем над улучшением предоставления информации, чтобы быть более конкурентоспособными.
Кроме построения карт сайта, eBay использует PR методы для лучшей связи с категориями. В 2010 году вы можете легко отслеживать самое популярное в категориях Поп-культура и Мода используя The Inside Source. Здесь вы найдете информацию с eBay.
До сегодняшнего времени мы концентрировали внимание только на магазинах. Тут мы разработали специальный фид, где мы добавляли контент основываясь на наши алгоритмы оптимизации.
Наши систематизированные сайты оптимизируются исходя из локальных потребностей. На них так же размещается информация о работе и жилье, что требует лучшей локальной оптимизации.
В настоящее время мы различаем 3 типа страниц просмотра вещей: открытая, закрытая, устаревшая.
Если страница открытая — это означает, что вещь все еще в продаже (от 1 до 30 дней) в зависимости от формата продажи. Так же у нас есть формат для хранения вещей, где срок действия — пока не отключат.
Закрытая — вещь закрыли, но она все еще доступна для просмотра. Контент располагается в базе данных, и страница все еще доступна по тому же адресу. По мнению пользователей такие страницы очень полезны, т. к. они позволяют просматривать изменение цены с течением времени.
Устаревшая — вещь больше не доступна. Старый адрес выдаст 404 ошибку, выводя сообщение, что вещь была удалена.
Раньше были попытки захвата адресов популярных вещей eBay. Несколько лет назад был запущен проект под названием "Лучшее на eBay". Это был сайт, где сообщество могло голосовать за лучшие вещи. Но к сожалению, проект не оправдал себя и был закрыт.
Вы правы, насчет того, что популярные вещи могут иметь не мало бэклинков. Я недавно купил книгу на eBay, в которой рассказывается о редких вещах за прошедший год. Только подумав о количестве ссылок на сэндвич "Вдова Мэри", приводит меня восхищение. Возможно не много людей каждый день ищут сэндвич который отображает вдову Мэри, но зато сколько тостеров это позволит продать.
Я иногда стараюсь придумать идеи по получению бэклинков на странные вещи, продаваемые на eBay. Ведь странные вещи — это один из способов белых методов добычи ссылок. т. к. они привлекают огромное внимание. Хотя бы взгляните на аукцион сайта PVRblog.com который начался от $0.99 и ушел более чем за $12K.
В 2010 году я возможно запущу проект о домашних животных, что вызовет не малый интерес. Имхо, до тех пор пока нашими проектами заинтересованы люди, мы всегда будем успешны в поисковиках.
Я реально люблю всю информацию на eBay! Я поставил перед собой цель работать как можно больше над информацией eBay.
Ebay это не только своего рода рынок, где покупатели и продавцы находят друг друга, но это еще и огромный поисковик, который отражает тенденции шопинга. При помощи анализа поисковых запросов и других данных мы с легкостью можем отследить популярные и не популярные продукты.
Наши коллеги из отдела по платному поисковому трафику постоянно строят модели поведения для каждого ключевого слова. На протяжении более чем 5 лет эта команда выжимает все из платного поискового трафика чтобы оправдать вложения.
На основе такого моделирования с предсказанием наша команда разработчиков построила собственную платформу для расчета бюджетов по платному поисковому трафику и возможную отдачу.
Если вы имеете огромное количество данных, то компании очень важно инвестировать в аналитические и технические ресурсы. Вам нужны аналитики, чтобы понять что нужно пользователям и какие проекты развивать, а какие нет.
Одним из таких примеров может быть внезапная вспышка популярности "Zhu Zhu Pets" как хороший подарок на Рождество в этом году. Большое количество онлайн провайдеров данных репортировало о популярности небольшого механического хомяка. Я заметил это увеличение по поисковым запросам с сентября, копаясь во внутренних поисковых данных eBay.
В 2005 году я прочитал книгу "Who Moved My cheese". После этого я пересмотрел мои подходы к жизни, т. к. как я поменял отношение к переменам. Перемены постоянно сопровождают нас. То, как вы реагируете на перемены, может очень сильно повлиять на вашу карьеру. Вот одно правило из книги, которое поменяло мою жизнь: "Что бы вы сделали, если не боялись?".
Я думаю, это был мудрый совет в жизни и поэтому я смог добиться того, к чему сейчас пришел. Я использовал возможность переехать в США, чтобы работать там, где всегда мечтал. Если бы я велся на поводу у своих опасений и страхов, я бы наверно этого не сделал. Но постоянно сталкиваясь с трудностями, которые мне приходилось испытывать, я всегда знал, что ничего не потеряю и смогу вернуться обратно в Нидерланды.
In order to become an SEO corporate level specialist you must do 3 things:
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