5 ms·

Why Google allows target.com to spam search results

35 points by madars 17y ago

robryan 17y ago
I would go as far to say any results page which is the result of an in site search should be removed, rarely if ever have I found any value from these pages through google.
- andrewljohnson 17y ago
  I disagree with this as an absolute. Google will often show cooks.com search results for a search for "X X recipe," and these are typically the correct result, showing a dozen similar recipes for the dish I'm looking to cook.
Maciek416 17y ago
Are these pages being served up as 404s ? If not, that sucks. If yes, why would Google diligently index a 404 and strongly rank it?
- madars 17y ago
  Unfortunately they are served as 200 OKs (see http://tinyurl.com/yzca7ec http://tinyurl.com/yzca7ec)
  - wgj 17y ago
    Which is spam, even if well intended.
  - pyre 17y ago
    I'm not really 'up' on involved rules with respect to web programming / interfacing with Apache, but is it standard practice to return a 404 when your search finds no hits? Technically it's not a 'page not found.'
    - ars 17y ago
      It would require extra programming, so is not done unless you think of it/get a special request for it. Should you use a 404? I could see arguments both ways. A "no results" result, is still a result. So it's not a 404. I would do a 404 if you try to link to a product that does not exist, but not for a zero results found page. BTW madars don't use url shorteners here - even for really long ones.
    - keltex 17y ago
      It really should have a <meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow"/> in the header. That's the proper way to not allow a page to be indexed.
    - whatusername 17y ago
      Google doesn't, so I'm not sure that they can hold it against others.
- tedunangst 17y ago
  When you search google for some random term that doesn't exist, does it send back a 404? No.
andreyf 17y ago
Big brands have more links and more trustworthy websites referring to them Here's something I don't get: where the hell are there links to target.com? I sure have never seen one...
- lmkg 17y ago
  I wish I could dig up the source, but someone claimed that Google was issued a patent for a method of using editorial preference in their ranking algorithm. The guess is that they use it to give preference to large brand-name websites. In general, this is understandable, when you're entering shopping queries in google the national brands are more relevant than their horrible business-unit-based website organization would normally have them rank. And, as the article points out, there are exceptions.
- almost 17y ago
  http://www.google.com/search?q=link%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.target.com http://www.google.com/search?q=link%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.targe...
  - andreyf 17y ago
    Hah! Good call.
  - redorb 17y ago
    https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/search?p=http://www.target.com&fr=sfp&bwm=i https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/search?p=http://www.ta... is a better source, it shows 3.1mm incoming links... https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/search?p=http://www.target.com&bwm=i&bwmo=d&bwmf=u https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/search?p=http://www.ta... Shows that only 267k are from outside sources. Target is getting the credit of internal link structure from all their other pages. </educated guess>
    - byrneseyeview 17y ago
      If that were true, this would be the best-ranked site in the universe: http://ianab.com/trillion/1.html http://ianab.com/trillion/1.html
almost 17y ago
"Imagine if each page generates just one visitor each day" Yes, just imagine that! While we're at it we could even imagine that each page generates 6 billion visitors a day. How bad would that be??? Looks like a flaw in Target's site. Not news. Not interesting. Not anything
wglb 17y ago
Interesting: this story is apparently of enough concern that when i serch for "Exercise Bike Clearance" I get mostly articles talking about Target spamming Google.
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
codexon 17y ago
This is a result of Google's reliance on domain authority over relevance and pagerank now. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-spam-illuminates-the-algos-reliance-on-domain-authority http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-spam-illuminates-the-algos... http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-googles-rankings-algorithm-has-changed-over-time- http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-googles-rankings-algorithm-ha...
vaksel 17y ago
how hard is it really, for Google to add if "we are sorry we couldn't find" + searchquery then nofreetrafficforyou I mean there are only a dozen or so ways for people say "we are sorry we tricked you into coming to our site with fake content", surely a company the size of Google can do a fix for this. Would eliminate overnight 90% of all those crappy fake search results
- bhousel 17y ago
  Now you have two problems..
- robk 17y ago
  But that's not really feasible for 100+ languages, not to mention character sets, etc. Editorial doesn't really scale for Google at all. For many of the smaller languages (i.e., outside the top 20 or so) Google only employs at most one native speaker who's tasked to work on search quality.
  - vaksel 17y ago
    but they only need to cover 1 language, English. EVERY SINGLE "fake" page I've seen was in English.
Evgeny 17y ago
A guy posted a "fictional" link to a search for "jon payne is so hot" on target website in the comments: http://www.target.com/gp/search/188-1977530-4602238?field-keywords=jon+payne+is+so+hot&url=index%3Dtarget%26search-alias%3Dtgt-index&ref=sr_bx_1_1&x=0&y=0 http://www.target.com/gp/search/188-1977530-4602238?field-ke... Soon enough, the search for "jon payne is so hot" on google returns target as top result. http://www.google.com.au/search?q=jon+payne+is+so+hot&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=com.ubuntu:en-US:official&client=firefox-a http://www.google.com.au/search?q=jon+payne+is+so+hot&ie...
- jrockway 17y ago
  It doesn't turn up anywhere in the first page of results. Towards the middle of that page, though, is this comment.
  - Evgeny 17y ago
    It certainly did at the moment when I was posting the comment. I did not make a screenshot though.
- timdorr 17y ago
  Also humorous, on these search results: http://www.google.com/search?q=site:target.com+We+could+not+find+matches+for http://www.google.com/search?q=site:target.com+We+could+not+... the top result is: "Anal Massage for Lovers Vol 2 : Target Search Results" :|
  - fatdog789 17y ago
    Dude, you may want to turn off personalized search results.
- hardik 17y ago
  Could not find target website in the results anymore. Either this was intentionally removed for being a hot topic or (imho more likely from what i have seen) google generally gives new content "opportunity window" on first page where if it to generate sufficient click throughs it gets buried; what you witnessed could have been that.

35 points by madars 17y ago

I would go as far to say any results page which is the result of an in site search should be removed, rarely if ever have I found any value from these pages through google.

andrewljohnson 17y ago
I disagree with this as an absolute. Google will often show cooks.com search results for a search for "X X recipe," and these are typically the correct result, showing a dozen similar recipes for the dish I'm looking to cook.

Maciek416 17y ago

Are these pages being served up as 404s ? If not, that sucks. If yes, why would Google diligently index a 404 and strongly rank it?

madars 17y ago
Unfortunately they are served as 200 OKs (see http://tinyurl.com/yzca7ec http://tinyurl.com/yzca7ec)
- wgj 17y ago
  Which is spam, even if well intended.
- pyre 17y ago
  I'm not really 'up' on involved rules with respect to web programming / interfacing with Apache, but is it standard practice to return a 404 when your search finds no hits? Technically it's not a 'page not found.'
  - ars 17y ago
    It would require extra programming, so is not done unless you think of it/get a special request for it. Should you use a 404? I could see arguments both ways. A "no results" result, is still a result. So it's not a 404. I would do a 404 if you try to link to a product that does not exist, but not for a zero results found page. BTW madars don't use url shorteners here - even for really long ones.
  - keltex 17y ago
    It really should have a <meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow"/> in the header. That's the proper way to not allow a page to be indexed.
  - whatusername 17y ago
    Google doesn't, so I'm not sure that they can hold it against others.
tedunangst 17y ago
When you search google for some random term that doesn't exist, does it send back a 404? No.

andreyf 17y ago

Big brands have more links and more trustworthy websites referring to them Here's something I don't get: where the hell are there links to target.com? I sure have never seen one...

lmkg 17y ago
I wish I could dig up the source, but someone claimed that Google was issued a patent for a method of using editorial preference in their ranking algorithm. The guess is that they use it to give preference to large brand-name websites. In general, this is understandable, when you're entering shopping queries in google the national brands are more relevant than their horrible business-unit-based website organization would normally have them rank. And, as the article points out, there are exceptions.
almost 17y ago
http://www.google.com/search?q=link%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.target.com http://www.google.com/search?q=link%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.targe...
- andreyf 17y ago
  Hah! Good call.
- redorb 17y ago
  https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/search?p=http://www.target.com&fr=sfp&bwm=i https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/search?p=http://www.ta... is a better source, it shows 3.1mm incoming links... https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/search?p=http://www.target.com&bwm=i&bwmo=d&bwmf=u https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/search?p=http://www.ta... Shows that only 267k are from outside sources. Target is getting the credit of internal link structure from all their other pages. </educated guess>
  - byrneseyeview 17y ago
    If that were true, this would be the best-ranked site in the universe: http://ianab.com/trillion/1.html http://ianab.com/trillion/1.html

almost 17y ago

"Imagine if each page generates just one visitor each day" Yes, just imagine that! While we're at it we could even imagine that each page generates 6 billion visitors a day. How bad would that be??? Looks like a flaw in Target's site. Not news. Not interesting. Not anything

wglb 17y ago

Interesting: this story is apparently of enough concern that when i serch for "Exercise Bike Clearance" I get mostly articles talking about Target spamming Google.

deleted 17y ago
[deleted]

codexon 17y ago

This is a result of Google's reliance on domain authority over relevance and pagerank now. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-spam-illuminates-the-algos-reliance-on-domain-authority http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-spam-illuminates-the-algos... http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-googles-rankings-algorithm-has-changed-over-time- http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-googles-rankings-algorithm-ha...

vaksel 17y ago

how hard is it really, for Google to add if "we are sorry we couldn't find" + searchquery then nofreetrafficforyou I mean there are only a dozen or so ways for people say "we are sorry we tricked you into coming to our site with fake content", surely a company the size of Google can do a fix for this. Would eliminate overnight 90% of all those crappy fake search results

bhousel 17y ago
Now you have two problems..
robk 17y ago
But that's not really feasible for 100+ languages, not to mention character sets, etc. Editorial doesn't really scale for Google at all. For many of the smaller languages (i.e., outside the top 20 or so) Google only employs at most one native speaker who's tasked to work on search quality.
- vaksel 17y ago
  but they only need to cover 1 language, English. EVERY SINGLE "fake" page I've seen was in English.

Evgeny 17y ago

A guy posted a "fictional" link to a search for "jon payne is so hot" on target website in the comments: http://www.target.com/gp/search/188-1977530-4602238?field-keywords=jon+payne+is+so+hot&url=index%3Dtarget%26search-alias%3Dtgt-index&ref=sr_bx_1_1&x=0&y=0 http://www.target.com/gp/search/188-1977530-4602238?field-ke... Soon enough, the search for "jon payne is so hot" on google returns target as top result. http://www.google.com.au/search?q=jon+payne+is+so+hot&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=com.ubuntu:en-US:official&client=firefox-a http://www.google.com.au/search?q=jon+payne+is+so+hot&ie...

jrockway 17y ago
It doesn't turn up anywhere in the first page of results. Towards the middle of that page, though, is this comment.
- Evgeny 17y ago
  It certainly did at the moment when I was posting the comment. I did not make a screenshot though.
timdorr 17y ago
Also humorous, on these search results: http://www.google.com/search?q=site:target.com+We+could+not+find+matches+for http://www.google.com/search?q=site:target.com+We+could+not+... the top result is: "Anal Massage for Lovers Vol 2 : Target Search Results" :|
- fatdog789 17y ago
  Dude, you may want to turn off personalized search results.
hardik 17y ago
Could not find target website in the results anymore. Either this was intentionally removed for being a hot topic or (imho more likely from what i have seen) google generally gives new content "opportunity window" on first page where if it to generate sufficient click throughs it gets buried; what you witnessed could have been that.