I know it happens from time-to-time, but the past couple days, I've run into an inordinate amount of keyword spam. I have saved searches for "Italvega" and "Serotta". The first generally returns a couple hits a week, tops. Today, it had 55! Similarly, the Serotta search generally returns a few hits a day, almost never for vintage stuff, mostly later bikes or Serotta fit bikes. Today, I got a ton of hits. The one seller I investigated was selling water bottles. Instead of simply keyword spamming, he added a totally unrelated picture of several high end bikes to the listing, then added a paragraph to his listing describing what was in that picture. Give me a break!

If any of you have friends doing this, please do me a favor and hit them upside the head with a 2x4. As for me, I guess I'll just have to waste time reporting these vermin to eBay.

My "Keyword" search on Ebay is Galmozzi. All I get is Kids Colouring Books.

Colora Galmozzi Francesca | eBay

Drives me nuts. The Chinese are the worst offenders

Welcome to E-Bay.

Just feel lucky you don't like Colnago bikes!!!

E-Bay keeps messing with their search functions, so it is possible that some revised search is picking up more keywords too. The last time I looked for the "Include Descriptions" option, I couldn't find it. Is it now the default?

And, I've never been convinced that their or/and searches are entirely stable which I find sad for such a HUGE company.

Not to contradict you, but the three I reported to eBay all had USA locations.

Craigslist is a mess too. I don't even sign up for alerts or you get just about every ad posted that day. Ridiculous.

I believe it. I was just adding my .02 of experience. Regardless or origin, that kinda stuff is usually a big red flag for me and I won't buy it.

It is annoying. I hit the report button a few times and noticed one of the offending ads was gone but it's not worth it now. I had a co-worker that also was an ebay merchant seller. He showed me one of his ads that was full of unrelated keywords. I asked him about it and he said he didn't want to sell to anyone that was bothered by keywords. REALLY?

It would be nice if eBay would provide an easy means for blocking sellers, whose ads you don't want to see.

Keyword abuse is rampant everywhere. Some sellers on craigslist can't be bothered to change their templates so all kinds of irrelevant stuff shows up. Ditto YouTube and any user-driven site that allows users to determine keywords or folksonomy.

In some cases -- especially blogs -- pre-cooked templates are stuffed with keyword spam by the template creators. The actual blog owners or template users aren't even aware they're promoting keyword spam.

Fortunately Google does a pretty good job of identifying the worst offenders and can help screen them out. I use Google searches, specifying the site I want to search, when a site's own search tools present too many irrelevant hits.

Sometimes a keyword helps bring an interesting item to light.
Like Reynolds 531, or Columbus, a few times if a seller did not include that,I never would have bought the item as it never would have been found.

Others spam to no end, always chuckle at some of the items included in Masi in cycling...
So it goes.

Friggin' "Eroica" is the keyword that has irritated me the most over the past year or so! Most of the sellers have NO concept what it means!

Next is probably Campy!

Another trick that these folks do to change the color of the font from black to white so you can't see their keyword spamming!

I used to report them. Sometimes it worked.

A number of years back some folks from the old rec.bicycles.tech newsgroup went after some egregious offenders with $0.01 increment bids - 50 bids in an hour!

The other one that gets me is "RARE" in reference to a Peugeot U08! Also 1960's or 70's on items that were clearly 1 or 2 decades later!

ARGH!


verktyg

Chas.

Maybe you could simply add: -(burning man)
to your Craigslist searches

BURNING MAN BIKES FOR SALE

Many sites will recognise the minus key.

I don't get how e-bay search works at all! For example if I use keyword "Miyata" I get number of ads that are located on eBay.pl. Then when I change location of item to "Poland" I get about 10 Miyata ads that are indeed located in Poland but they didn't show in the previous search! Also non of the ads from location:eBay.pl is the same as location: Poland. That's just soooo confusing!

It has been a while since I've bought FIAT parts on E-Bay, but it was always a pain to try to force searches to include Europe.

Many sellers would mark that they would ship to Europe, but not to the USA, but would in fact ship to the USA if one first contacted them.

Sometimes one would find one part, but the look at the other items the seller would have for sale, and the list would be blank.

I would think that E-Bay would use both a person's location (IP Address), as well as the country website to locate a person. It should be fine as long as you're not working for an international company that uses a VPN that forces the IP address to appear elsewhere.

I can only imagine the chaos caused by FIAT reintroducing car model numbers, but that wouldn't be E-Bay specific.

Itself, Ebay is a spamming company.

You could likely be looking at an item exclusively and only on Amazon and in short time a side bar on certain browsers, a pop-up of similar listings on ebay appear. You can control most of this of course by using and adjusting browser settings but it does prove they are a spamming company.

+1 on that. That'll weed out sellers with overpriced items too if eBay search can have that option.

The one Polish Miyata was listed with worldwide shipping. The others were only listed for shipping within Poland, or at least not to the US. At least that's what I think is going on.

Well, at least that they try to target their ads. It's just as much Amazon's fault and the fault of Doubleclick (more owned by Google) or some other ad servicing company.

Let's face it, they are all in cahoots with one another. One of them draws our attention elsewhere while the other peeks in our back pocket and checks our wallet.

I guess this is an annoying issue in a very minor way... But remember the days before ebay? Ebay has made it astronomically easier to find that Suntour derailleur from 1981 that you really need to finish your bike. Frankly I really don't care about this stuff as long as the core mechanic keeps working.