Slashdot Mirror
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/
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
Please explain to me why should I care about shareholder value when trying (and failing) to find a product with Google.
Meh, indeed.
Kid-proof tablet..
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.
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.
Extra points if you mention HP whose web technologies are for a technology company nothing short of incredible.
I'm not sure if you mean that in a good way or a bad way...
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.
Chalk one up for Bing
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
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...
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?
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.
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
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
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 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 .
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..