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Are you wondering why our SEO traffic is headed back up in the US? If so, keep reading. . .

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What?

Related searches was a project to deliver relevant related searches to the area just below the search box in the SDC header (see below).  For the US we delivered about 7million new keywords sourced from eBay.  We also updated the our site map and implemented canonical tags for our search results pages. This first phase of related searches covered 13% of searches, the second phase (Soft Match) launched in Aug and covered about 96% of queries (Miko will send out more details on the Soft Match release).   Note, that what is currently in production for related searches is Phase 2 (Soft Match).  Below is an example of the related searches for “toaster oven”.

 

When?

At the end of June, we launched  Related Searches (KW URL 5) to production.  In mid-Aug phase 2 launched (Miko will send out more info on the results of the Phase 2 Launch).

 

Why?

The previous related searches were targeted only by the category and attributes (i.e. not necessarily related to the keywords entered by the user), so they usually created a bad user experience.  We wanted to have a much larger volume of keywords that were highly targeted to the user’s search query.  The large volume was expected to generate additional SEO traffic because these “related searches” links are one of the main ways that Google finds the content on our site (Google bot does not enter search terms on our site.)

What Happened?

We saw a significant increase in SEO traffic for cross-category pages (where most related searches land) in the US.

Click-ins on product pages is shown as a point of reference (related searches don’t link to product pages).

The lift shown above only occurred in the US. We believe related searches was not as successful for SEO in the international countries because International countries have much less content which means that we created a lot of pages based on the new keywords but we didn’t have the selection of deals to properly fill these pages. We do have a filter to not show related searches that have no deals, but on average the international pages had fewer deals per page.  But all the countries benefited from more relevant related searches for our users.

Here is the data for each country:

How?

This project was a great example of cross-pillar collaboration as it relied heavily on Research, FE, Search, Data Warehouse and SEO.  Even though we had almost no dev support from the search team, because they were booked with Kadu qualification, Damon from community  went above and beyond the call of duty to customize a version of Kadu to power related searches which allowed us to successfully launch this important project.  Tamir creatively suggested that we leverage eBay’s keywords which saved a lot time in the end.

This project is also a great example of being able to leverage the Kadu platform (it runs on  version of Kadu).

Who?

Special Thanks to the great work of the people on Phase 1 (Hard match) team:

 

Dev: Dmitry Yesin, Zin Lim, Joe Hanink, Clyde Jones, Damon Sauve, Tamir Rozenberg

Ops: Lakshman Mandali

QA: Morgan Weiss, Jane Lisinker-Korobov, Emilia Gentcheva

Research: Dominic Hughes

SEO: Johnny Jiang

Product: Tamar Bar, David Little

BI: Lana Schuler

eBay Support: Dan Kramer

Inception movie explained programmatically

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Inception movie explained programmatically — scrapped off the site by me; constructed by A R Karthick.

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README

Programmatic representation of the Brilliant movie: INCEPTION by the Genius Director THY name is Christopher Nolan!

My tribute to Nolan in “C” Language and a bit of assembly (x86) as the inception is done using x86 code morphing so that Fischer wakes up thinking that the thought was originated from his mind. Running the program would unravel the entire sequence in the movie. Reading the code would explain the movie Programmatically.

In order to compile the code, just type: “make” And run the code by typing: “./inception” , to see the sequencing in the movie and have the code exit with Fischers Inception thought planted by the Inception team!

-Karthick (a.r.karthick@gmail.com)

European Union gives thumbs up to videogaming for kids

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Following are some choice quotes that you probably wouldn’t hear in
the US Congress, where videogames are often a convenient whipping boy to
curry favor with soccer moms.

According to the European Union’s parliament: “Video games can stimulate learning of facts and skills such as strategic thinking, creativity, cooperation and innovative thinking, which are important skills in the information society.” (Hat tip to e-mint post)

Travelscope tales

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You understand why people get snobby about coach holidays when it all goes horribly wrong. By that I mean on our holiday, having changed the destination pick-up point from Stratford to Dover we thought we were being oh so clever (boarding the bus at 7-something in the morning rather than 3-something). But we failed to take account of the Travelscope factor – the bus (no.13, I kid you not) failed to pick us and another couple up. So two hours later, after plenty of assurances from Travelscope reps at the Dover pick up, and then much scratching of heads, they realised oops, he’s gone without you!

Luckily, the Travelscope factor kicked in and we were sent by taxi to meet up with another coach which itself was late because it had been sent to the wrong pick-up for another set of pasengers. (So we got to travel to France by tunnel rather than ferry); and ended up first in Amsterdam rather than Utrecht. But eventually we got there.

So nice holiday, coach driver turns out to be a nice guy as I said with his knowledge of Ypes, the WW1 battlefield, and the fact that the town of Ypes was entirely rebuilt with Gernam reparations money.

So we changed drivers back in England, we drove back to Stratford to be dropped off, and just as I was advising our taxi where to meet us the coach driver admitted – he didn’t know Stratford – and had to be guided by the passengers!

Note: a letter to Travelscope is in the post..

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