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."

Comments

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: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.

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 tops out at a perfectly believable 149,000 hits.

Really. 14 million?

FFS: Something here stinks.

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

[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: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.

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. 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.

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.