Are We Seeing The Downfall of eBay?

Written by Pablo Palatnik on November 24, 2008

As the holidays near, eBay will make its big marketing push to attract buyers to the site using all types of media. As an eBay account holder with an eBay store for one of our businesses, I recieved a call from eBay telling me how to “optimize” my business on eBay with email marketing which is a free tool in the ebay store.

With a weak economy, eBay is hurting and now needs the help from its sellers to push their products as much as possible to buyers. For the past two years now, eBay has been enforcing rules that does not entice sellers to sell on the website. Rising listing fee’s, feedback issues against sellers, and more. This has pushed eBays view to sellers in a very negative way, I think most would agree on that.

Nielsen Online shows a dramatic drop of 30% in October 2008 in pageviews. Amazon is gaining ground in traffic and seller interest.

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Googles SearchWiki To Change The Face of Search and SEO

Written by Pablo Palatnik on November 21, 2008

Google has introduced SearchWiki, which now personalizes search for all users which have a Google account and are logged in. What does SearchWiki do? The New York Times reports, “allow people to modify and save their results for specific Google searches. They can move the sites that appear in rankings up or down, take them out altogether, leave notes next to specific sites and suggest new sites that are not already in the results (or are buried too far down in the results to see).”

How will this change search? That remains to be seen but it has a significant impact on user search as we have seen in the past year or more as personalization on the web has become increasingly important to users and Google has been at the forefront of that with iGoogle, etc.
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New Google Search Based Keyword Tool

Written by Pablo Palatnik on November 20, 2008

From the Google Adwords blog, Google announced the release of a new search based keyword tool! I have to hand it to them, they really do provide a great wealth of information for us online marketers to have successful campaigns, I think a little more transparency will be enough to be very happy with them but they are working on that, I think. Google recently changed the way they calculate quality score which I dont know how much that helped out advertisers, not sure yet.
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Where Should I Place Google Ads On My Pages?

Written by Pablo Palatnik on November 19, 2008

Inside Adsense, Googles blog all about Google Adsense has put out a 3 part series on their blog called Optimisation Essential. It is a fairly decent series for beginners to get the basics and knowledge all about Google Adsense and how it can best work for them.

This series goes hand in hand with a post I wrote last month, “Best Performing Adsense Ads Explained,” which Google also put out their own version in this series in the post “best-performing ad unit sizes.”

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