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.

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.

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.