What really happened to eBay dropping in Google’s search results this week? A source familiar with the situation tells Search Engine Land that Google hit eBay with a manual penalty this week.
A manual penalty is when a human being at Google reviews a site and decides that it deserves some type of slap. Previously, it was assumed eBay was hit by the Panda 4.0 Update that rolled out this week, where a wide-range of sites were with with automatic penalties.
That might also be the case — eBay might have been hit by Panda in addition to a manual penalty, which was reported earlier by Re/Code.