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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."
Exercise Bike Clearance
signature is pants
At the bottom of every Google Search result page is a link titled Dissatisfied? Help us improve. Click it. Tell them the link is spam. Google ends up filtering them out of the search results, and we all win!
"GET / HTTP/1.0" 200 51230 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; Setec Astronomy)"
You obviously work for the ONLINE FITNESS CLEARANCE STORE. Attempting to get a health equipment store slashdotted would seem like an impossible task.
BREWERY CLEARANCE STORE, now there's a Google search worth submitting. I'll be in my car driving to the Plank Road Brewery. Thanks.
Task Mangler
number 3 on "we could not find" http://www.target.com/gp/search/ref=sr_bmvd_redirect?field-keywords=Anal%20Massage%20for%20Lovers%20Vol%202&url=index%3Dtarget%26search-alias%3Dtgt-index
The "target.com" online store is run by Amazon for Target, not by the company that does the brick and mortar stores. (Long story.)
So which of them is doing this? If it's Amazon, it's not exactly surprising -- spammers, patent trolls, and "search engine optimizers" sound like pretty much related categories.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
Target employs SEO. For a company their size that's diligence. Now list companies in the Fortune 500 that neither know nor care about SEO and report back how much that's costing the shareholders.
Extra points if you mention HP whose web technologies are for a technology company nothing short of incredible.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
So an SEO'er is complaining because someone else is ranking higher for some SEO terms. I bet the article write was paid to optimize some pages and couldn't get them higher than Target's, so he is trying a different approach to knock Target down.
Live by the sword, die by the sword. Why is Slashdot even giving a link to an SEO'er for this lame article?
The big question is how are these pages getting indexed? Generating them isn't wrong but there should be no links to them.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
When I search for that on Google, I get the mentioned company fourth in the non-sponsored links.
-- Tim Little
Colorless green Cthulhu waits dreaming furiously.
I came here to report the same thing! “Anal Massage for Lovers Vol 2” Wow.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
Then you're doing it wrong. How can you not find things with Google? I Google everything, and it never lets me down.
Now back to the topic: SEO maximizes shareholder value by claiming high-ranking positions in the search engine namespace for brands. In as much as ownership of mindshare is a symbol game, to ignore the main vehicle used by cash-ready consumers to find their heart's desire is high idiocy. It does not serve the shareholders, nor the board.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Well, I'm pretty annoyed that areyoutargeted.com is second to target.com in some searches.
Grrr!
Is anyone really surprised that the amount and ranking of spam goes up when you include spammy terms like "clearance" in your search?
But is on expect-exchange.
-Woof woof woof!
Target dumps toxic waste off the Ivory Coast. For a company their size that's diligence. Now list companies in the Fortune 500 that neither know nor care about inexpensive toxic waste disposal and report back how much that's costing the shareholders.
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.
Bing??? Bah! I'm Not Going there.
This is not spamming. Google has indexed their search pages (valid) but they are not static and so they fail. The google link is to "clearance" items, and there are no clearance bikes. Why would target want people clicking links that tell visitors that they don't carry that stock? I think a little common sense before accusatory blogging would have been a good idea here. Feel free to debate whether indexing of search results pages is a good thing.
Page rank is broke and to be honest it always has been. "These terms only appear in links pointing to this page".
And I get 'http://www.alexa.com/hoturls?q=exercise bike clearance' which links to 'http://www.goodroi.com/why-google-allows-target-com-to-spam-results/', a post dated December 10, 2009 (thirteen days ago).
No biggie.
from spamming the dissatisfied feature or even abusing it to remove competitors? The former might make it harder to filter out the true complaints and the latter hurts businesses in general.
Google is a great search engine that is liked by a lot of people. However, too much power in the hands of one company is undesirable, as we all know.
For example, when the service starts to break down, like in this instance.
Therefore, I believe that search engines should be made more interchangeable, just like other products, e.g., email programs (gmail vs. yahoo), processors (Intel vs AMD), etc.
Google is commoditizing the software world, which is a good thing (well not for some developers), but search engines should be just as interchangeable. In some respect, search engines are already interchangeable, since you can just go to any other search site (yahoo, etc.). However, it turns out that users do not easily make the switch. This has to do (mostly, I think) with user-experience.
So how can we improve the situation? By allowing the user to have the same (or almost the same) experience independent of the chosen search engine.
This can be achieved by having an open search API that can be accessed by web-browsers (or third-party websites), so that the user-interface is decoupled from the search-engine. Such an API should implement things like "give me the first 10 search results for some query", "give me a cached version", "give me similar links", etc.
Of course, major search engines would not easily switch to such a method, since their influence on the user would be restricted by that (they cannot anymore control the placement of ads, other than in the search result list). However, the smaller search engines (altavista, yahoo, bing) could start to support such a scheme, and cooperate with browser implementors (mozilla), to gain more market share.
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
Check out the first link that comes up when you alter the example search just the slightest bit - type into a google text field:
[site:target.com "could not find matches for"] and you get this (NSFW on that first link).
- I doubt they meant for that to happen.
Chalk one up for Bing
Isn't that the whole point of SEO? If your site has useful content and you want good pagerank, just write well-structured, accessible HTML with a sitemap and spread the news. If your site is spam, use SEO. "But", says, "you can also risk damage to your site and reputation".
Way to go, Fitness Equipment Clearance (whatever that is).
For both google and bing the auto suggest for "exercise bik" now comes up with "exercise bike clearance" as the top results. Pushing out the obvious top search choice of "exercise bikes"
This article is only 10 minutes old, and I do not see any of the aforementioned results clicking that link.
The only results I get about "Excersize bike clearance" are all about how Target is spamming search engines! Interesting...
There isn't a link to target in the first 50 results.
'Anal Massage for Lovers Vol 2 Wow.
Vol 1 wasn't enough? Wow indeed!
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
How is this spam? Seriously. It only takes a second or two to figure out what happened:
1. They were selling a product and made a URL for the page listing that project.
2. People linked to that page (and google ended up indexing it).
3. They stopped selling that product, so the URL is no longer valid. Instead of just returning a 404, they changed it to a search page, so you might find a similar product to what you were looking for.
4. Someone clicks the link to the page for the product google indexed, and the search page at target is sent.
Should google index those pages? Maybe not, but since they aren't strictly error pages, and at one point they were normal pages, it makes sense that they would index them normally. I don't think this is a secret communist ploy by Dr. Evil of Target corporation.
I wonder if this could have something to do with behavior I've seen from Bing. They create thousands of searches based on some keyword matrix related to other content on your site and feed them to your site as if they were real searches (but without identifying themselves in the user agent although it comes rapidly right after a hit from msnbot/Bing and from the same IP). Could Bing be generating crappy links somewhere or could Google be trying to do the same thing and getting confused when the Target site tries to handle the bad searches?
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Not sure whether this is related, but I was searching target.com yesterday via Google and got lots of hits to pages for products they apparently don't sale any more. Maybe they need to first remove old pages before they up their rank...
It's obvious that these pages are just part of the built-in search and will return for any random search terms. 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.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Regardless of motives, this is a valid complaint. If I search for something, I don't want to see anything from anyone who has no information on that topic.
My guess is that some of these links might have come from affiliate data feed links (or affiliates using spamming techniques to generate urls based on keyword search terms), where they might have done some 301 magic on products no longer available... A lot of the links contain the term 'ref=sr_bmvd_redirect', which i can't see anywhere on Target's site, but i can see it being mapped somehow from their feed url format 'http://www.target.com/gp/redirect.html/ref=tgt_adv_xsd*****?url=/***product keyword***/' Whether it's down to google, target or their affiliates, IMO Target should do the decent thing and put a noindex meta tag on the search results page, and Google should do more to mark this sort of page as duplicate content (even if it does contain embedded google ads, which might be helping the unique content factor).
"exercise bike clearance" is apparently the second hottest search query right now...
http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends?sa=X&oi=prbx_hot_trends&ct=more-results
"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?
That would be an easy fix I think...
Doing SEM research the other day I did find it surprising that Target had taken over as the #1 spender at almost $500k per day according to spyfu.com.
1 target.com $423,581.84
2 ebay.com $395,401.14
3 amazon.com $341,729.78
4 expedia.com $328,923.27
5 google.com $326,629.21
Why would Google do anything about Target when they are spending so much money? I guess you can just pay your way to the top.
I was actually going to read the blog, but it is down. Why is this on the /. frontpage when the url about why this is happening does not work?
The world is how you make it
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.
I find being offended by me offensive.
pfffft... try typing in clearance. The top 4 are all retailers and the top isn't Target, it's Walmart. Where did you get this story, Christmas shopping?
You're now the first hit :o)
As a comment on the original article suggested, Target just needs to block gp/search in their robots.txt file to prevent that crap from being indexed.
In the absence of such action, Google surely has a way to block it themselves.
---
According to the latest ruleset, this post should be modded as Vorpal Flamebait +5.
Trust me. The advanced anal massage techniques in Vol 2 make it well worth reading. I know what you're thinking... Why not just skip right to Vol 2? The basic techniques in Vol 1 are an important foundation and you could do some serious harm if you failed to understand those basic principles first.
The results have all changed. No longer is Target the target of results, but all the blogs that have picked up the story. Now "exercise bike clearance" returns blog entries as the top results. Seems if the offense is egregious enough, all we have to do is flood the blogosphere with the same term to drown out the offending phrase, thereby beating SEO optimization at it's own game.
Maybe it's the holiday spirit talking, but I'm not at all bothered by what Target is doing. They're trying to game an unfair system just like everyone else. I'm far more irritated by the hoops that Google makes web publishers jump through. From writing SEO-friendly copy that is practically unreadable by humans, to deciding to penalize sites for syndication agreements, and, most of all, for being vague about exactly what they want everyone to do. Can't tell you how many times I've heard contradictory advice starting with the phrase, "So-and-so at Google told us to do it this way."
...this?
http://current.com/items/91149842_black-kids-computer-desk.htm
Uh-oh. Volume 2 didn't mention lube.
Actually, I think Target could fix this pretty easily. They are sending a "302 Found" response for the original request and redirecting to the search results. They should be sending "410 Gone". The 302 tells Google that the search result page is the new location for the page. Now, maybe Target doesn't mind getting all that extra traffic, and if they're using the wrong reponse code on purpose, that does seem like a form of spam.
Please, Target just generates a page when a search has no results. Big Deal. It's not a game, and many places do this.
BTW, targets page was the third one when I search for 'Exercise Bike Clearance' .
I'm not sure how this 'breaks googles rules'. Which is a stupid statement because it assumes Goggle is some sort of authority of what people can do on the web; which they are not.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
http://www.target.com/gp/search/178-2905776-2539507?field-keywords=your+mom+is+hot&url=index%3Dtarget%26search-alias%3Dtgt-index&ref=sr_bx_1_1&x=0&y=0
Because when people go to google and don't find target.com they will go to another search engine.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I have an acquaintance in target's SEO department and they're paying google in the hundreds of millions of dollars each year for search advertising (adwords and custom ad building. I wouldn't be surprised if they figured out a way to help them rank well for bogus products as a result.
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.
Empty search results are against our quality guidelines: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/empty-review-sites/ I asked my team to check into this.
SO . . . their website was /.'ed, eh?
I had the same THIRD result for the blogger's 1st example (and the submitter suggested we only try exercise bike; the second example not this first one). The blogger's example picture for google's "site:target.com "We could not find matches for" " shows only the first TWO results. Cut off just before the 3rd! Can it be that both blogger and submitter exised the Anal massage results? Why? Can someone find where Anal Massage 1 is? Are there more volumes than two? What did the blogger and submitter know about Anal Massage we don't? The cover up failed and if my own Anal Massage queries weren't blocked by my employers, family, internet provider and numerous court orders, I'd search for it myself, directly, and see why Target and Google can't use their obvious keenness on this subject to support my appeals as friends of the court. Ercise bikes, eh? Is the saddle removable on any of those?
'Anal Massage for Lovers Vol 2 Wow.
Vol 1 wasn't enough? Wow indeed!
There were some gaping plot holes that needed to be filled.
Seems we have slashdotted the first couple web sites that come before Target when using google.co.uk .
I did some cross searches to find similar rank results, and get this one:
Searching for "Anal Massage for Lovers Vol 2" brings put a #5 position for Target!
kdawson's Mom must be very proud of her anencephalic offspring.
If it weren't foe slashdot he'd be totally unemployable.
Edith Keeler Must Die
Actually they just have to block that one page: "http://www.target.com/gp/search?field-keywords="
Better yet why don't they fiter out all search pages from websites? I hate finding what looks to be the exact page I need on a google search only to click it and end at "http://www.target.com/gp/search/192-2967276-3174027?field-keywords=exact+page+I+needed" I don't think its spamdexing on targets part, it's google's fault for not figuring out that linking to searches run by other companies, is useless and annoying to users.
Google is simply indexing the deep web with their toolbar. Someone with the Google toolbar searches Target.com for something non-existent, gets an html page that says there are no matching results, and Google indexes it. The irrelevant Target.com results on Google are systemic to Google's indexing of sites and content that it can't reach but its toolbar users can. The irrelevant results are Google's fault, not an evil search engine optimization ploy by Target.
By the way, someone mentioned Target should use a 404 error, but that doesn't seem right. A search that doesn't have any results shouldn't give you a 404, it should give you page that says there aren't any results. Google's toolbar is simply indexing those "no results" pages.
Apparently, tons of people search for (funny) stuff that doesn't exist on Target.com (check out the results for inurl searches for "not found" on Target.com).
Google is using target's search engine to run searches and doesn't know how to interpret the string "We could find no matches"?
Not spam. Bad coding at Google.
We are the 198 proof..
"Then you're doing it wrong." - by symbolset (646467) on Wednesday December 23, @03:28AM (#30533514)
SymbolNOBODY, IF anyone's "doing it wrong" around here, that'd be YOU: After all, You said what's quoted below from you, here -> http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1476008&cid=30428430
"It's tolerated (perhaps encouraged) in part because these annoying actors are otherwised engaged in improving Linux. Major Debian and BSD contributors, for example, use slashdot as a workspace for their human-machine interaction side experiments, of which APK is probably one. In addition many of these trolls post links which, if you follow them, will completely hose a Windows machine. This is part of the game. - by symbolset (646467) on Monday December 14, @01:15AM (#30428430) Journal
I took offense to the BOLDED part... & ALL you EVER seem to have is "ad hominem" based attacks on people, not the points they make. So, my reply in the URL below was simple (and logical):
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1476008&threshold=-1&commentsort=0&mode=thread&pid=30428430#30430244
Additionally, "symbolNOBODY"? Well - the day you can make something like this (& that got you PAID for it, & that has done as well for others online):
http://www.tcmagazine.com/forums/index.php?s=b861a743aa23c4568b7d73e07ef7ecec&showtopic=2662
That's also gone over 250.000 views worldwide in 1++ yrs.' time online, & across 15 forums where that guide for Windows Security has been made either an:
1.) "Sticky/Pinned" thread
2.) An "Essential Guide"
3.) Rates 5/5 stars (etc.)
AND, gets "feedback" like this from users that have applied it:
----
http://www.xtremepccentral.com/forums/showthread.php?t=28430
PERTINENT QUOTE/EXCERPT:
"...recently, months ago when you finally got this guide done, had authorization to try this on simple work station for kids. My client, who paid me an ungodly amount of money to do this, has been PROBLEM FREE FOR MONTHS! I haven't even had a follow up call which is unusual. Now I don't recommend this for the average joe, but it if can work for a kids PC it can work for anything! Now, i substituted OpenDNS and activated the Adult Content filter with them for this kids computer. I know its not perfect, but will catch over 99.5% of said sites."
and
http://www.xtremepccentral.com/forums/showthread.php?s=10f9ba9ad5ff990aaae1e7ec91f593a2&t=28430&page=3
"Its 2009 - still trouble free! I was told last week by a co worker who does active directory administration, and he said I was doing overkill. I told him yes, but I just eliminated the half life in windows that you usually get. He said good point. So from 2008 till 2009. No speed decreases, its been to a lan party, moved around in a move, and it still NEVER has had the OS reinstalled besides the fact I imaged the drive over in 2008. Great stuff! My client STILL Hasn't called me back in regards to that one machine to get it locked down for the kid. I am glad it worked and I am sure her wallet is appreciated too now that it works. Speaking of which, I need to call her to see if I can get some leads. APK - I will say it again, the guide is FANTASTIC! Its made my PC experience much easier. Sandboxing was great. Getting my host file updated, setting services to system service, rather than system local. (except AVG updater, needed system local)"
Thronka - forums m