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

Could have made it a link

[master5o1]

Exercise Bike Clearance

Re:Could have made it a link

[Inda]

My first result is http://www.fitness-equipment-clearance.co.uk/

What is the problem here?

Re:Could have made it a link

[mlk]

Or Inda used google.co.uk, which does return fitness equipment clearance first and Target second.

Re:Could have made it a link

[jabbathewocket]

The thing is.. this is an article about over SEO pages designed to 'game' google's pageranking.. obviously its not gonna work on yahoo or bing.. since they use different algorithms , and frankly given google's market share its obvious that marketers would game it.. same way malware writers tend to aim for the low hanging fruit that is MS windows or IE. Google search won vs Yahoo because it was far more inclusive of more pages (there was a time when yahoo was still a directory edited by hoomans) they also had this lovely bit of not being a slow loading page full of ads and other shit that people didnt want or need to see when they wanted to search quickly.. In fact the rise of Google as defacto search engine pretty much mirror's IE rise.. they may not have been "the best" but they where always the least "bad" of the bunch.

Re:Could have made it a link

[ta bu shi da yu]

I tried site:target.com we could not find matches for and the third option was Anal Massage for Lovers Vol 2.

I wasn't aware that Target marketed to this demographic.

Re:Could have made it a link

[Inda]

Ah correct. .co.uk for me.

And c'mon LtCol Burrito, do you honestly beleive I don't know the difference between sponsored links and actual results? I'm not new to this internet thingy.

Re:Could have made it a link

[sopssa]

What's interesting is " Results 1 - 10 of about 14,800,000 from target.com for "We could not find matches for" "

So this is really huge seo spamming.

Re:Could have made it a link

[spyrochaete]

The query you want to run is:
[blockquote]site:target.com "could not find matches"[/blockquote]

This produces 604,000 results. Definitely black hat seo spam. Google needs to either filter "/search?" and "/ref=sr" or they need to penalize Target like they would for any other spammer. Target is a large American retailer so Google probably won't do anything at all.

Re:Could have made it a link

[hairyfeet]

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?

Re:Could have made it a link

[oldhack]

... I have found the older folks just eat it up. They treat it [Yahoo home page] 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.

And then they come out to ./, telling us to get off their lawns, rambling on about their onion belt and whatnot.

Crazy old people.

Re:Could have made it a link

[Anonymous Coward]

And c'mon LtCol Burrito, do you honestly beleive I don't know the difference between sponsored links and actual results? I'm not new to this internet thingy.

Well, you clearly don't know the difference between .co.uk and .com !

Easy response

[bl968]

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!

Re:Easy response

[techno-vampire]

I hope every slashdotter reading your comment takes your advice. Target deserves to be slammed for that.

Re:Easy response

[kurt555gs]

I just removed it and commented that Target.com was spamming Google. I added that I found this on Slashdot.

I wonder if the slashdot effect works with this?

Re:Easy response

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Easy response

[farlukar]

As if slashdotters would search for exercise bikes...

Re:Easy response

[ricree]

I disagree. While using another search engine certainly gives google and inventive to improve the search, it doesn't really help them to do it.

People switch services for all sorts of reasons. Fashion, apathy (if, say, they switch computers and it has a different default engine), etc. Dissatisfaction is just one reason, and since the process of leaving is silent, they have little enough way to tell why.

Reporting the trouble to them gives them the reason you're dissatisfied in a way that switching doesn't. Of course, they're always free to ignore it, but at least if they do then switching can be an incentive for them to improve rather than an enigma they have to puzzle out.

Re:Easy response

[JackieBrown]

Maybe if there were such a pattern.

Try exercise equipment clearance. Not Target.
exercise machine clearance
Heck, even "exercise bike" and "exercise bike sale" doesn't lead to Target.

Hell, the example on their page is a site speficic search site:target.com "We could not find matches for"

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

[maxwell demon]

Of course they do. But only to install Linux on them.

Re:Easy response

[LtCol Burrito]

(Sorry, my friend, I just have to go here)

OK, so you want us to stick it to the big monopolistic corporation by using....Bing?? Way to fight for the little guy!! Stickin it to the man!!

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.

Re:Easy response

[digitalchinky]

Bing! Are you sure that even searches the same internet? :-)

Re:Easy response

[oreaq]

Or get the CustomizeGoogle plugin and simply remove target.com from all Google search results.

Re:Easy response

[lofoforabr]

Seems Slashdot effect is playing its role:

6th most popular search in the past hour.

Re:Easy response

[drinkypoo]

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.

Re:Easy response

[2obvious4u]

Isn't that called a gym?

Re:Easy response

[e2d2]

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.

Re:Easy response

[ArsonSmith]

WTF is a gym?

Re:Easy response

[SEWilco]

WTF is a gym?

Gym is a guy I met IRL at the convenience store, when I was buying a pizza and chips. I tried to email him, but encountered some weird site featuring steel and leather furniture.

Re:Easy response

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh a gym! (pronounced gime)

Re:Easy response

[teko_teko]

He's dead, Gym!

haha

[isaac.anthony]

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

Re:haha

[supersat]

Google for link: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. Six sites are linking to it! It's showing up in Google's results because people are linking to it.

Of course, the story is a bit trickier than that. 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).

In many cases, this is a reasonable thing to do. People point to content they care about. They usually don't care what the exact URL is. If the URL changes, they likely still care about the original content. Target's redirection breaks this assumption, but I'm not sure there's a straight-forward fix. Perhaps they could return a 404 response (with the same content) when redirecting from a broken product URL?

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.

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]

Generating them is wrong, according to Google:

Quality guidelines - basic principles

• Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines. Don't deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as "cloaking."
• Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you'd feel comfortable explaining what you've done to a website that competes with you. Another useful test is to ask, "Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn't exist?"
• Don't participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or "bad neighborhoods" on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.
• Don't use unauthorized computer programs to submit pages, check rankings, etc. Such programs consume computing resources and violate our Terms of Service. Google does not recommend the use of products such as WebPosition Gold(TM) that send automatic or programmatic queries to Google.

Quality guidelines - specific guidelines

• Avoid hidden text or hidden links.
• Don't use cloaking or sneaky redirects.
• Don't send automated queries to Google.
• Don't load pages with irrelevant keywords.
• Don't create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
• Don't create pages with malicious behavior, such as phishing or installing viruses, trojans, or other badware.
• Avoid "doorway" pages created just for search engines, or other "cookie cutter" approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.
• If your site participates in an affiliate program, make sure that your site adds value. Provide unique and relevant content that gives users a reason to visit your site first.

Emphasis mine, on the areas that Target is plainly and obviously not following. There's a bunch of other stuff listed which they might be doing as well, but I can't be bothered to look into it any further at the moment.

Re:How are these getting indexed?

[glwtta]

Well, that makes it "undesirable to Google" rather than "wrong".

Re:How are these getting indexed?

[jrumney]

I don't see how they are breaking any of those terms.

It seems to me that they used to have a page for Exercise Bike Clearance which ranked highly for whatever reason. Now that the promotion is over, the page no longer exists and requests for it end up going to a lame search engine that can't even direct users to the page for full price Exercise Bikes, which would at least help target to sell something instead of annoying users and sending them straight for the back button. The fact that Google is still indexing it with the old ranking is Google's problem.

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:How are these getting indexed?

[will_die]

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.

Re:How are these getting indexed?

[MikeFM]

Did you read the article?

There is nothing wrong with having a page not return results to a search. There isn't anything wrong with responding to the search terms from a referer. As far as I can tell they aren't hiding anything or participating in any kind of link scheme.

The only issue would be if Target is somehow tricking Google into going to these pages for select terms. More than anything this seems like a bug in Google's algorithm.

Re:How are these getting indexed?

[cenc]

I could see target using a database dump of searched terms in to an automated XML map that google bots are slurping up.

Re:How are these getting indexed?

[MikeFM]

Could be although I'd think that kind of thing would leave a trail and not be overly beneficial. My guess would be someone else was trying to create some sort of mashup or steal content or some such or that Google is experimenting with indexing content hidden behind form submissions. (Bing does this.)

Re:How are these getting indexed?

[Tweezer]

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.

Re:How are these getting indexed?

[Van Vleck]

Honorable AC quotes...

There's no irrelevant keywords here, no hidden text, no hidden links,

Uhmm... Here's an H1 tag that's hidden, exactly the sort of SEO trick that google warns against.

<h1 class="offscreen">Welcome to Target Products and Promotions</h1>

And more relevant, perhaps, here's one from the "Your Mom Is So Hot" Target search.

<h1 class="offscreen">your mom is hot Products and Promotions</h1>

In this case, there are no actual promotions available from Target about "Your Mom is So Hot," which means, I think, that it's expressly deceptive. And here are some hidden links on the page as well.

<a href="#mainBody">Skip to Main Content</a>
<a href="#leftNav">Skip to Left Navigation</a>
<a href="#scripted_tabs">Skip to Product Information Tabs</a>

These links cannot be seen in a regular browser. Dunno if this qualifies as nefarious or black-hat, but it's definitely, obviously hidden links. Of course, any site with a dropdown menu has hidden links on it, but these hidden links on the Target.com page don't even qualify for that. Perhaps they show up if you have javascript disabled, or browse from text-only browser. The point is, in a regular browser, they are hidden links. I suppose I'm responding to an AC troll. But I do find it interesting that Target.com can get away with clearly deceptive hidden H1 tags. That's like the definition of amateur black hat SEO.

Re:How are these getting indexed?

[PongStroid]

<h1 class="offscreen">Welcome to Target Products and Promotions</h1>
<h1 class="offscreen">your mom is hot Products and Promotions</h1>
<a href="#mainBody">Skip to Main Content</a>
<a href="#leftNav">Skip to Left Navigation</a>
<a href="#scripted_tabs">Skip to Product Information Tabs</a>

These are used to allow users navigating the site with screen readers an easier time. Search for 508, screen readers, and accessibility for more info. A bit more searching will show target was sued 3 years ago for its site not being accessible to blind users.

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.

I have found the solution!...

[Tei]

But is on expect-exchange.

Obviously not intentional

[Temporal]

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.

Re:Obviously not intentional

[whencanistop]

I'm going to go with you on the unintentional options here. But it probably means that someone at Target hasn't really worked out what is going on yet. I mean - there are some quite sophisticated tracking technologies going on there, someone should know that there are people arriving at these random searching pages from Google and then working out if they actually sell anything from it. If people then click through to the actual exercise bike pages and buy stuff, then it will probably look like it is profitable and will discourage them from removing it. Whilst you may think getting them pointed at the 'correct' landing page might lead to higher conversions, it may possibly be that by sending them to the search pages even for things they don't sell, they make more money, because they get visits for things they wouldn't do normally.

Although it would make more sense if they noidnexed those search results pages, to be fair.

Re:Obviously not intentional

[Wildclaw]

Google's algorithm puts trust in domains that other people link to.

Exactly. And that is the flaw in the algorithm. You can't trust the whole site just because some of the pages are well linked to. Links to a certain page, only indicate that the specific pages are interesting and/or relevant, and only concerning the subject linked about.

This flaw has become more and more noticeable with Google over the years. You often notice pages from more popular sites popping up, even though they have nothing relevant or new to add about a specific search query.

Re:haha - Mod up!

[AliasMarlowe]

'Anal Massage for Lovers Vol 2 Wow.

Vol 1 wasn't enough? Wow 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.

Re:Nothing to see here.

[onepoint]

I would agree that this is closer to a bug than anything else.

But good seo work will take advantage of any bug and I feel that they must have put someone in the SEO department and said " hey, let's try this".

When testing ideas on SEO you always take a tiny non revenue non supporting section that you play with and see how the search engine's behave. the best thing that Google ever did was create the button on webmaster control for "see how we crawl" ... talk about properly learning the different tricks to feed a search engine ...

anyway, this whole thing is a non-issue, give it 2 weeks and Google will be clearing this right up and problem solved.

Misleading title

[gmuslera]

"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?

Re:Target, or Amazon?

[interiot]

"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.

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.

Only Google has this problem

[Animats]

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.