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eBay wiki wiki wiki

The eBay Wiki launched today, it is a community driven wiki that eBay has created in collaboration with JotSpot. JotSpot was the first company to create a wiki platform, similar to the platform used by Wikipedia.

In Richard McManus's review of the eBay Wiki on his blog, ReadWriteWeb, he says,

"It will also help eBay in the search engine rankings, as its user-generated content coffers will increase significantly over time!"

Because of his insightful comment, I had to take a closer look and give my 2 cents about how effective I think eBay will be at obtaining search engine rankings.

Here are a few major issues that I see with the eBay Wiki and how it is optimized for search engines:

URL strings should be friendlier.

• The URL strings should contain words that represent the entry instead of numbers. Using words in the URL strings can help increase your search engine rankings and it is preferred over numbers or extraneous characters. Plus it makes more sense to searchers when they see the listing in the search engine result pages.

• The eBay Wiki way: (not so friendly)
  http://www.ebaywiki.com/Articles/1000000000000113
  http://www.ebaywiki.com/EBayCommunity?topic=EBayCommunityTopic179

• The Wikipedia way: (very friendly)
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebay
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebay/Othercontroversialpracticesofusers

Ebaywiki.com needs it's own sitemap.

• There is a sitemap on the eBay Wiki, but it is a shared sitemap with ebay.com. The Wiki is a separate domain name and should have it?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s own sitemap. EBay might have done this because the two sites are connected, but ideally, they should have one sitemap for each separate domain name.

On-page optimization can be improved.

• The site could be more section 508 compliant. They should also make better use of alt and title tags for links and images.

• Meta tags and web page title tags need some improvements. Currently there is no meta description tag and the title tag for each page is the same. If both of these tags are unique for each page, the search engines will recognize each page of the website as a unique page. This also helps them "classify" each page in the search engine index.

• Instead of "eBay Wiki (Beta)" as the title tag for each page, the tag should be something like "Wiki Best Practices - eBay Wiki (Beta)"

• The meta description could be something like "Here are a few tips for anyone that is new to Wikis to keep in mind as they contribute articles to the eBay Wiki."

The eBay Wiki can surely improve eBay's business and subsequently help drive more traffic to eBay. The one thing that I like is the fact that they created the Wiki on a separate domain name. This allows them to utilize viral and non-viral link building, without compromising their main website. It also allows them to push traffic to another domain name, which is a more controlled place for content, compare to the ebay forums or the ebay website as a whole.

Nevertheless, they will not be able to maximize the effectiveness of the new domain name unless they make their site more search engine friendly. You can have the greatest content in the world, but with sloppy code and non-friendly pages the results will be limited.