Target.com's Aggressive SEO Tactic Spams Google 241
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."
haha (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Easy response (Score:3, Interesting)
I just removed it and commented that Target.com was spamming Google. I added that I found this on Slashdot.
I wonder if the slashdot effect works with this?
Re:Easy response (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, it is easy, but before we all do this, we should consider who the article writer is. The article is written by an SEO'er, and I can only guess that they are trying to compete on some terms for which Target currently outranks them. Why would we work to hinder one company's SEO work just to help another SEO'er?
The entire article is just the complaining of a butthurt SEO'er because they couldn't get their own terms to rank. This shouldn't have even made Slashdot, since this isn't supposed to be the trolling ground for Internet Marketers.
Re:How are these getting indexed? (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't see how they are breaking any of those terms.
It seems to me that they used to have a page for Exercise Bike Clearance which ranked highly for whatever reason. Now that the promotion is over, the page no longer exists and requests for it end up going to a lame search engine that can't even direct users to the page for full price Exercise Bikes, which would at least help target to sell something instead of annoying users and sending them straight for the back button. The fact that Google is still indexing it with the old ranking is Google's problem.
Obviously not intentional (Score:5, Interesting)
This is obviously not intentional. If it were intentional, Target would be providing decent landing pages. For instance, Target actually sells exercise bikes. If they were intentionally spamming the term "exercise bike", why on earth would they be doing it with an error page rather than provide an actual exercise bike page? That doesn't make any sense.
As for Google, I think it's a safe bet that they have zero interest in having these crappy results in their result list. There's probably some sort of bug affecting this. Perhaps Target recently changed their site and, in so doing, broke a ton of links that were perfectly valid before? If so then my guess is that these will disappear after a short time, once the ranking system catches up.
Never attribute to malice that which is better explained by incompetence.
Re:Easy response (Score:1, Interesting)
I just removed it and commented that Target.com was spamming Google.
Then you're a moron. Target is not spamming google, google is spamming Target with search queries taken from what users are searching google for, then indexing the results. This way google can 'see' a little bit into sites that have information only easily accessible from searching.
You sheeple need to stop and think before you automatically assume google's side and blame others.
Re:Could have made it a link (Score:3, Interesting)
What is the problem here?
Re:How are these getting indexed? (Score:1, Interesting)
I don't buy that. Legitimate people (i.e. not SEOers) are supposed to have put 15 million DIFFERENT links to failed Target searches somewhere, often enough for Google to rank them so high?
Plus, it's not only target's search engine that does this. I get increasingly more Google results from other search engine's "not found" or "generic non-content landing site" pages. In my opinion this is intentional SEO spam.
Re:Easy response (Score:2, Interesting)
OK, so you want us to stick it to the big monopolistic corporation by using....Bing?? Way to fight for the little guy!! Stickin it to the man!!
Re:Could have made it a link (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:How are these getting indexed? (Score:5, Interesting)
For newegg to keep around old products is a boon for me since I can quickly check the specs of products I previously purchased from them. If I want to purchase new memory or a new processor I can easly see what currently have and what kind of new product I need. A decent amount of parts resellers tend to also do this.
For Target to keep around old items provides no real value. If someone is looking for an old product the stores are better off to direct them to we do not sell them anymore and have a bunch of pictures and links to products they do sell now and are the replacement for the item the person is looking for.
So like you say there is something messed up with Target keeping that many products around. Also if you go to target.com and do search you don't get that page, you get nice page where they cross out the various searched for words and show you examples of want those new search would provide.
Re:Easy response (Score:3, Interesting)
Seems Slashdot effect is playing its role:
6th most popular search in the past hour.
Re:How are these getting indexed? (Score:3, Interesting)
Did you read the article?
There is nothing wrong with having a page not return results to a search. There isn't anything wrong with responding to the search terms from a referer. As far as I can tell they aren't hiding anything or participating in any kind of link scheme.
The only issue would be if Target is somehow tricking Google into going to these pages for select terms. More than anything this seems like a bug in Google's algorithm.
Re:How are these getting indexed? (Score:3, Interesting)
Could be although I'd think that kind of thing would leave a trail and not be overly beneficial. My guess would be someone else was trying to create some sort of mashup or steal content or some such or that Google is experimenting with indexing content hidden behind form submissions. (Bing does this.)
Re:Easy response (Score:4, Interesting)
If you log into google you get to just click to denote relevance of links, there's a promote button and a remove button. Legend is that google watches this information and ranks down pages regularly removed from results.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Easy response (Score:4, Interesting)
No the writer is pissed because those terms are linking to bogus result pages. If they were legit terms and the results directed to actual items then it would be a win for target and everyone else. But they are spamming the search and as a whole search results get muddied for everyone. It's a legit complaint IMHO. I want real results, not spammed links.
Re:Target, or Amazon? (Score:5, Interesting)
"When a guest logs on to Target.com and searches for a particular word, that search includes Amazon.com's millions of books, music and (movie) titles," Target said in its statement. "Target.com is currently working with Amazon.com to suppress certain titles from the Amazon.com catalog from appearing on the Target.com web site." [boingboing.net]
For a while, Target appeared to be selling marijuana, MDMA, crack, blowjobs, etc. Those have since been removed from Target.com, but Google is apparently still indexing those product searches.
Re:How are these getting indexed? (Score:5, Interesting)
I just clicked your link and the third entry is We could not find matches for "Anal Massage for Lovers Vol 2". I'm pretty sure Target never carried that product confirming what you say. I'm wondering if they are spamming from some sort of fixed database or if they are using failed queries from their site. If they are using failed queries, we could turn this against them. Someone could write an app to search target.com for bestiality, necrophilia etc. I wonder if Target would be happy to be the number one result for those search terms.
Only Google has this problem (Score:3, Interesting)
I just tried "exercise bike clearance" on Google, Yahoo, Bing, Ask, Baidu, AltaVista, and Cuil. Only Google picks up the bogus Target pages.
The problem, I suspect, is Google's "site map" scheme, which allows sites to explicitly specify their page tree for indexing purposes. Those bogus pages don't have links to them, so the link-based search engines don't find them.
A solution to this is for Google to detect sites with large numbers of pages in their site map that are similar and lack external links. When that's found, mark the site map as search spam, and index the site based on links only. That will drop all the bogus pages from the index. Webmasters will notice this via the webmaster tools and stop doing it.