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

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

[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

[maxwell demon]

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

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?

[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: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?

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.