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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."
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)"
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.
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..
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?
But is on expect-exchange.
-Woof woof woof!
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.
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.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
'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
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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'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.
And then they come out to ./, telling us to get off their lawns, rambling on about their onion belt and whatnot.
Crazy old people.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.