Are you a lawyer?
I hope this is not legal advice you're giving, because the general best practices I've always learned using pictures in marketing material: "Never show brands or products names"
Don't you know that this is a simplification of the fees for casual sellers, where before, there were multiple tranches for listing an item, and if it sold successfully, you also paid a final value fee.
The new fees represent a simpler and better to understand system, where the first 50 items per month for casual sellers are free to list, and easy to understand final value fee.
This is in fact a decline in % of what you would pay!
You know there is a reason they don't participate on these forums... It's a waste of their time! They are so busy working their strategy, making money on the web, that any time spent on a discussion like this, while no money is made, is very low on their priorities.
I think you just proved the point here: SEO can be very valuable. Any good SEO would point out to the BBC that having similar rules for User-agent: Googlebot-Mobile and User-agent: * is not very efficient.
Well, Eric Schmidt once said: "If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place" or "Every young person one day will be entitled automatically to change his or her name on reaching adulthood in order to disown youthful hijinks stored on their friends’ social media sites.”
Pretty scary if you think about it that the same guy completely banned a CNet reporter from all Google briefings just because he showed a case of all the information he could find through Google on Eric Schmidt...
I think the first is true, lots of upvotes less comments, probably because people are in general interested but not knowledgable enough to answer the question.
The second, it might be that people who comment don't agree with the question, and see an upvote as a vote for your question.
Where I explain how we did this at eBay when I was working there.
eBay is quite unique from the fact that millions of new URL's get created on a daily basis, with a short lifespan.
Maybe people jump on this comment because initially it was said he agrees with the post, but because John is an SEO by profession the post can't be good!
@PlanetGuy,
You would be surprised how much SEO best practices you need to successfully launch a project nowdays. I see so many startups with great concepts, clean code and user excitement, but if you fail to be returned in the search engines for queries your potential user base is looking for, your growth might be limited to the viral word of mouth.
That's where the so called "viral" strategies come in, leveraging the social integrations and viral sharing described in the article. Quick hacks to gain the user growth you need to become a viable business.
A great launch plan does incorporate good SEO and search visibility. Denying SEO is adding value for your projects/startup or company because there are scumbags out there, is IMHO putting you at a disadvantage vs your competition who are looking and taking advice from people like John!
There have been plenty of insightful discussions here at HN about the need for SEO. Rather than spilling negativity and dismissing a valuable service, you might want to try to listen and learn something.
At least it's not an issue with the speed of Google indexing, as this HN post is already in their index, and at the top when you search for "I feel the voting system is ripe for abuse and will be used to silence dissenters. By making it anonymous you're really making it too easy for that to happen."