Dear Etsy community,
I’m Jay Bergesen, head of the Etsy.com team. For the past several weeks, we have been running an experiment aimed at driving more traffic to your listings by increasing Etsy’s ranking on search engines. We have already seen really positive traffic and conversion results among those included in the experiment.
The experiment achieved these results by automatically adding links to the bottom of certain pages. A few days ago, we learned that some of those links contained terms that were unexpected and, in some cases, offensive to members of our community. This was unintended, and we apologize.
Upon learning about this, we shut down the experiment, and are reviewing the code and our internal processes to prevent this from happening again.
We are working to quickly address the issue and relaunch this experiment to make sure that our entire community can benefit from the increased traffic and sales.
Thank you for being part of the Etsy community.
