'eBay is discontinuing guides' Grrr.

I worked quite hard on the two Guides I had created but mine already disappeared. About four months agoI worked quite hard on the two Guides I had created but mine already disappeared. About four months ago

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'eBay is discontinuing guides' Grrr.

Well, we did know this was coming. I'd asked Tyler about it on one of the Weekly Chats. Still, I thought they were a valuable tool for buyers. More expertise can be shared with a Guide created by an expert than by random numbskulls writing Product Reviews....

 

No matter, like the message says, I'll just move them to a blog linked to my independent site. (Which is going nowhere fast. I simply don't have the time right now to do it justice.) 

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'eBay is discontinuing guides' Grrr.

'eBay is discontinuing guides' Grrr.


@momcqueenwrote:

Well, we did know this was coming. I'd asked Tyler about it on one of the Weekly Chats. Still, I thought they were a valuable tool for buyers. More expertise can be shared with a Guide created by an expert than by random numbskulls writing Product Reviews....

 

No matter, like the message says, I'll just move them to a blog linked to my independent site. (Which is going nowhere fast. I simply don't have the time right now to do it justice.) 


Google was never happy with the guides. Specifically the multitude of them that were written by spam houses who were paid (by guess who) to populate the site with spammy content to artificially game search rankings. That was part (and not worst practice) of what lead to the manual search ranking penalty that shaved hundreds of millions of dollars off eBay's revenue and killed the majority of the organic search traffic (and corresponding sales) that originated outside of ebay.

 

If one looks what they are doing with the SDI, SSL, and the push to get genuine user content on site in the form of product reviews it is very clear that they are trying to rebuild site structure to optimize external site traffic without having to keep increasing their google ad spend or raising our fees constantly so they can throw coupons around like ebay is actually discounting something rather than giving our money away.  A lot of the old tricks and site structure have been swept away to give them a bit more of a clean slate moving forward although their relationship with google is still "complicated" as it was recently described in an earnings review. 

 

There were quite a few good and genuinely useful guides that I've stumbled upon in my time on ebay. If your content is still relevant your idea of attaching them to a blog then linking back to your listings is a good one. It's pretty trivial to setup a basic blog and add a simple plugin to start linking to your ebay listings. Add in your photo content you have built up over the years as well as your knowledge of your niche and content associated with that and you have a fairly low cost way of driving some outside traffic to your ebay or web store listings.

 

Ebay should be looking at relaunching these as ebay authored blog articles with guest content/analysis by authoritative sellers in various niches. While having reviews attached to catalog items is fine and dandy and cataches up to 90's ecommerce it is far less effective than having peer content/recommendations. That drives sales far more effectively than the old we bought a bunch of 5 star reviews off mechanical turk/vine/etc that Amazon sellers/brands invest so heavily in...

 

 

 

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'eBay is discontinuing guides' Grrr.

what are the guides? I am sorry as a new. I am clueless apparently about a lot of things
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'eBay is discontinuing guides' Grrr.

Anonymous
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Me too!!

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'eBay is discontinuing guides' Grrr.

@vintagetonow2134 wrote:
what are the guides?

http://www.ebay.ca/gds

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'eBay is discontinuing guides' Grrr.

I wrote two. I went to ebay.co.uk to do it as they allowed more graphics design within the confines of their format. They have since disappeared. As in, disappeared months ago. All that remains is one early draft of one from ebay.com. 

 

http://www.ebay.ca/gds/10-Steps-to-Hassle-Free-Buying-on-eBay-/10000000204701784/g.html

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