On MerrJep, on top of the usual flood of listings, you can watch ordinary sellers learning to pad their posts with extra keywords to surface better in search, keywords that go completely unfiltered and just clutter up search on the site instead of actually helping anyone find anything. It’s happening more and more. It doesn’t look like whoever maintains the site is treating it as a problem worth fixing.
One real listing I found had an ordinary item buried under a genuinely absurd pile of unrelated keywords, everything from car models to apartment rental terms to electronics brands, stacked in with no relationship to what was actually for sale.
Half out of curiosity, I decided to run the same test myself: drop a long list of unrelated keywords into a post of my own and see how well it ends up ranking in search. If a site’s own search doesn’t filter for relevance, gaming it is trivial, which is exactly the problem.
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