Since the mysterious update of this February I have seen a trend among several e-commerce sites I handle. In all cases overall impressions for keywords have stayed steady or gone up... but conversions have gone down. Why? Because a small elite handful of "golden" keywords for each site were jumped by big name Amazon-size sites. Their lost impressions have been filled with FAR less valuable non-selling terms, thus making overall impressions actually go up while sales dip. Oddly these "golden" keywords don't have a shit ton of daily searches necessarily. But these high-conversion keywords were highly researched by me and are absolutely KILLER at converting into sales. They convert at as much as 50X the rate of what most in their given niche would consider a "big fish" keyword. Why do I think this could be an intentional result? Because Google has shown us that more and more it favors the larger e-commerce sites in rankings with updates. Furthermore, Google has all the data they need via Adwords to know EXACTLY which small keywords convert at the highest rate. So if they wanted to reward the big boys while making the little guys THINK they aren't losing anything they could easily make overall impressions stay the same yet bleed high conversion terms. Meanwhile the Amazon's of the world once again get more and more Google love. This isn't all tin foil hattery on my part, I've read of others noticing this same increase in impressions paired with drop in sales. I would not be shocked if the little guy was once again under attach again, this time under the table. Thoughts...?
He's talking about real ecommerce sites, not affiliate sites. If Google really did that, I wouldn't be surprised. First they made it harder for the small sites to rank for their target keywords, now they've made it harder to profit. What a beast! Nevertheless, Google owes no one anything.
The only time they get slapped back is if they step on toes like Yelp's. I'm more and more suspicious that something weird is up now. Will be running a fine tooth comb over several sites this weekend looking for exactly where the leaking is, but so far it looks to lione up exactly with where the golden paid keywords are. Very unlikely coincidence isn't it?
