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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."
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.
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.
There is also major difference between newegg and target.
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.
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.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Uhhhhh...what ads? if you go to the actual search page there isn't any ads, nor has there been as far as I can remember. The problem is folks seem to get This Page, which is often the default page for things like AT&T DSL, for the actual search page when they are two completely different sites.
The funny thing is, as much as I dislike the "home page" of Yahoo, working on PCs for many years I have found the older folks just eat it up. They treat it as "the paper" and will often spend quite a few minutes there reading headlines, checking their Yahoo Mail, looking at stock quotes or checking their horoscope, before every venturing onto the "real" web. So considering how many customers have that set as their home page and have a royal fit if you dare change it, well they must be doing something right there.
But I stand by my original statement: If you ever use the "more" tab (little blue down button below the search box) you will quickly think other sites just suck. To me that more tab is THE killer feature of search. If I type in something like...say "dark knight" I not only get the usual reviews and clips, but with the more tab I get profiles on the actors, interviews with the director (which I didn't even know who was before the more tab and whose interview I found quite fascinating) all sorts of springboards for jumping off of my original search. Google uses something kinda sorta like it at the bottom of their page, but it isn't nearly as complete and page placement matters.
So while most may think Google is all that and a bag of chips I'll just have to stick with what works. Plus this SEO business shows that Yahoo Search is more like Linux-Less visible and thus less a "target" for malware. And competition is always of the good,right?
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
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.
"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."
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.
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.