Kev Price SEO

My favorite Google news story this week is a great demonstration of partner relationship and reputation management…

background:

Ebay purchase more ads on google than anyone else in the world, it’s a little less than $100 million a year, or thereabouts. Google also have a deal with Ebay to sell adverts on Ebay websites overseas.

Ebay do not allow processing of payments on their auction site via Google’s checkout system, which is potentially a huge rival of their own checkout system Paypal.

Ebay apparently banned Google Checkout as a service on its site because it is ‘unproven’.

ok, so the story…

Ebay hold an annual party in Boston for thousands of their biggest sellers. Google, in their infinite wisdom decided it would be a great idea to invite those sellers to its own party to promote Google Checkout.

Let Freedom Ring, a Google party to celebrate freedom offering “free food, free drinks, free live music — even free massages”.

Now, this didnt seem to sit too well with Ebay, who quickly decided to run their own marketing experiment in which they “shifted marketing dollars”, dropping all their Google ads.

Whether you believe this was an experiment or not…

Google blog - “After speaking with officials at eBay, we at Google agreed that it was better for us not to feature this event during the eBay Live conference.”

Ebay have not yet confirmed how long they will run their ‘experiment’. I do have a feeling it wont run too long though