Target.com's Aggressive SEO Tactic Spams Google

eldavojohn writes "Greg Niland is blogging about target.com's aggressive near-spam search engine optimization, and is more than a little critical not only of how this affects the most popular search engine, but also why it will probably persist. If you want an example, search for 'Exercise Bike Clearance' and click the first link."

Re:Easy response

[techno-vampire]

I hope every slashdotter reading your comment takes your advice. Target deserves to be slammed for that.

How are these getting indexed?

[MikeFM]

The big question is how are these pages getting indexed? Generating them isn't wrong but there should be no links to them.

Re:Meh

[adolf]

Please explain to me why should I care about shareholder value when trying (and failing) to find a product with Google.

Meh, indeed.

Re:Easy response

[Antiocheian]

The best way to help Google improve is to use another search engine. Blacklists don't work.

Making Google understand that good alternatives exist is the only way to force them to improve, for example...

Exercise Bike Clearance [bing.com]

Re:Obviously not intentional

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the bigger problem is that Google's algorithm puts so much trust into big name domains like Target now that something like this could happen.

Re:Easy response

[netsharc]

I don't think it works that way... no way Google would hammer a site by forwarding queries that its users have entered.. for one thing target.com would go up in smokes a few seconds after such a mode is activated.

Maybe target's got a database of what its customers have queried in its own search pages, and created a page somewhere with "failed queries: [1] [2] [3]", and it let Google visit [1], [2], and [3], entering those pages into its Borg-mainframe..

Re:How are these getting indexed?

[adolf]

Dear AC,

If you'd R'd the FA, you'd have noticed this: http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Atarget.com+%22We+could+not+find+matches+for%22 [google.com].

Therein, are some 14 million dead links which land on Target's do-nothing search page.

Will you really have me believe that target.com has been linked to for over 14 million specific products which they no longer sell?

Not even Newegg, who tends to keep old product pages around for ages after they've stopped selling an item, has this problem: http://www.google.com/#hl=en&q=site%3Anewegg.com+%22this+product+is+no+longer+available%22 [google.com] tops out at a perfectly believable 149,000 hits.

Really. 14 million?

FFS: Something here stinks.

Re:Obviously not intentional

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm convinced that it's intentional. Several - mostly shady - sites are doing it, i.e. pretend there's a search result for your generic terms. Some just say "not found, but try our other crap", while others create pages that actually contain the terms you were looking for with links that lead somewhere totally unrelated.

As for the "exercise bike" example and why there is no specific landing page, judging from the sheer volume of "not found" pages, they most likely use some sort of dictionary. It's easier to simply spam millions of term combinations. They want people to end up on their site, no matter what.

Re:Obviously not intentional

[whencanistop]

I'm going to go with you on the unintentional options here. But it probably means that someone at Target hasn't really worked out what is going on yet. I mean - there are some quite sophisticated tracking technologies going on there, someone should know that there are people arriving at these random searching pages from Google and then working out if they actually sell anything from it. If people then click through to the actual exercise bike pages and buy stuff, then it will probably look like it is profitable and will discourage them from removing it. Whilst you may think getting them pointed at the 'correct' landing page might lead to higher conversions, it may possibly be that by sending them to the search pages even for things they don't sell, they make more money, because they get visits for things they wouldn't do normally.

Although it would make more sense if they noidnexed those search results pages, to be fair.

Re:Easy response

[LordAndrewSama]

I did the same thing, but when I went to the bottom of the page found this from google trends:

16th most popular search in the past hour.

Re:Easy response

[oreaq]

Or get the CustomizeGoogle plugin and simply remove target.com from all Google search results.

Re:Could have made it a link

[Inda]

Ah correct. .co.uk for me.

And c'mon LtCol Burrito, do you honestly beleive I don't know the difference between sponsored links and actual results? I'm not new to this internet thingy.

Re:Could have made it a link

[sopssa]

What's interesting is " Results 1 - 10 of about 14,800,000 from target.com for "We could not find matches for" "

So this is really huge seo spamming.

Nothing to see here.

[MikeFM]

It's obvious that these pages are just part of the built-in search and will return for any random search terms [target.com]. They're not doing anything suspicious. The only odd thing is that Google is somehow indexing the pages. It's more likely a bug in Google or someone somewhere thought it'd be amusing to create a bunch of links to Target for random search terms.

Re:haha

[spyrochaete]

People are linking to an old product URL (Target sometimes has humorous products on their site), which Target redirects to a search page when they no longer carry the product. Google indexes this redirect and treats both URLs as the roughly the same (you'll notice that the links you find above point to a product URL, not the search result URL).

Good sleuthing there. It's a clever feature to run a search on similar products if the desired one is not found. It may or may not have been intentional for Target to pollute search results with garbage. However, Google's mission statement is "To organize the world's information and make it useful", and failed retailer SERPs are not information nor useful.

This is hardly a new issue, though. Try looking for walkthroughs for a video game that has just been released and you'll find many SERPs full of "game123 walkthrough" links, only to click them and find a page with the content "be the first to submit your walkthrough." Misleading search users is a failure of Google's mission statement.

Misleading title

[gmuslera]

"Target.com's Agressive SEO Tactic Spams Slahdot". Probably will have hundreds of more visits just managing to be published in slashdot frontpage than with playing with Google algorithms. And after this history is enough discussed and linked everywhere, google algorithms do their normal work putting it to the roof. Why trick robots when people is more than willing to do the dirty work?

Next Microsoft

[harl]

I've been saying it since they took away _exact_ text searching. They peaked. It's all downhill from here.

Good thing gets big. Quality suffers.

Sometimes case and special characters are what separates exactly what I'm looking for and pages of crap.

Don't get me started on treating search terms an acronyms and returning pages that don't contain the search term but something, usually an entity name, who's initials make up my search term. Returning a page that doesn't contain my search term is a failure state.

Re:Nothing to see here.

[onepoint]

I would agree that this is closer to a bug than anything else.

But good seo work will take advantage of any bug and I feel that they must have put someone in the SEO department and said " hey, let's try this".

When testing ideas on SEO you always take a tiny non revenue non supporting section that you play with and see how the search engine's behave. the best thing that Google ever did was create the button on webmaster control for "see how we crawl" ... talk about properly learning the different tricks to feed a search engine ...

anyway, this whole thing is a non-issue, give it 2 weeks and Google will be clearing this right up and problem solved.