eBay Inc. confidential 1

Structured Data

Frank Cheng

Head of SEO, Global Platform

SMX West 2014

eBay Inc. confidential 2eBay Inc. confidential 2

Agenda

• WHO am I?

• WHY is structured data important?

• WHAT did we do?

• WHEN and WHERE did we do it?

• HOW has it performed?

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WE HAVE BUILT THE WORLD’S LARGEST CLASSIFIEDS BUSINESS

ECG GLOBAL FOOTPRINT

MINORITY INVESTMENTS

2005

2004

2005

2005

2008 2011

GLOBAL

UNIQUE VISITORS

PAGE VIEWS A

MONTH

23 COUNTRIES

TOTAL

LIVE

ADS

18.3M

100M

6B

VIBRANT

MOTORSBUSINESS

We make a difference in the life of 100M people, enabling them to

find the house, job, car or product they need

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Structured data has become more important with the new Google

“Hummingbird” algorithm

“Google said that Hummingbird

is paying more attention to each

word in a query, ensuring that

the whole query — the whole

sentence or conversation or

meaning — is taken into

account, rather than particular

words. The goal is that pages

matching the meaning do

better, rather than pages

matching just a few words.”

~ Danny Sullivan

Creative Commons Photo by s p e x

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Steps to markup your site with structured data

1. Go through http://schema.org/docs/full.html to identify potential

schema.org item types and properties available / relevant to your site

2. Go through all categories, attributes and information elements on your site

and map them to relevant markup items

3. Modify original HTML to include markup item code

4. Successful implementation can be tested using Google tool:

http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets

5. For breadcrumb mark-up, use Microdata format instead, outlined at

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/185417

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Different categories and attributes should be mapped to the most

relevant schema.org data types and properties

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After the launch, we have seen # of items and # of pages with

structured data items increase by 300%

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Crawlers also responded positively to the change by crawling

more pages and downloading more content from our site

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As a result, we have seen more pages indexed on Google

0

500,000

1,000,000

1,500,000

2,000,000

2,500,000

3,000,000

Pre Post

# of URLs indexed by Google for page type A

57%

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SEO traffic increased between 150% and 200% for page type A

-50%

0%

50%

100%

150%

200%

250%

300%

7-N

ov-

13

10

-No

v-1

3

13

-No

v-1

3

16

-No

v-1

3

19

-No

v-1

3

22

-No

v-1

3

25

-No

v-1

3

28

-No

v-1

3

1-D

ec-1

3

4-D

ec-1

3

7-D

ec-1

3

10

-De

c-1

3

13

-De

c-1

3

16

-De

c-1

3

19

-De

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3

22

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3

25

-De

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3

28

-De

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3

31

-De

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3

3-J

an-1

4

6-J

an-1

4

9-J

an-1

4

12

-Jan

-14

15

-Jan

-14

18

-Jan

-14

21

-Jan

-14

24

-Jan

-14

27

-Jan

-14

30

-Jan

-14

2-F

eb

-14

SEO Traffic Growth by Category

AUTOS

ELECTRONICS

FASHION

HOME & GARDEN

PROPERTY

SERVICES

JOBS

* Other SEO improvements also launched with the same release that may have also impacted traffic for page type A

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SERP rich snippets and Google Knowledge Graph are applications

of how Google use the data and could provide traffic opportunities

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Takeaways

• Easy to implement, but hard to get everything right in the first

implementation, especially for mega sites with complex category

structure and attribute data scheme

• Main benefits came from

– Crawlability: More pages being indexed and crawled

– CTR: More clicks generated from the same SERP positions

• Be ready for the future – Conversational search, entity search…etc

Frank Cheng

Head of SEO, Global Platform

eBay Classifieds Group, eBay Inc.

frcheng@ebay.com