
Why Google allows target.com to spam search results - madars
http://www.goodroi.com/why-google-allows-target-com-to-spam-results/
======
codexon
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...](http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-spam-illuminates-the-algos-
reliance-on-domain-authority)

[http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-googles-rankings-algorithm-
ha...](http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-googles-rankings-algorithm-has-changed-
over-time-)

------
Evgeny
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-
ke...](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)

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...](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)

~~~
timdorr
Also humorous, on these search results:

[http://www.google.com/search?q=site:target.com+We+could+not+...](http://www.google.com/search?q=site:target.com+We+could+not+find+matches+for)

the top result is:

"Anal Massage for Lovers Vol 2 : Target Search Results"

:|

------
robryan
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
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
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
Unfortunately they are served as 200 OKs (see <http://tinyurl.com/yzca7ec>)

~~~
pyre
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
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.

------
wglb
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.

------
vaksel
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

~~~
robk
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
but they only need to cover 1 language, English. EVERY SINGLE "fake" page I've
seen was in English.

------
andreyf
_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...

~~~
almost
[http://www.google.com/search?q=link%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.targe...](http://www.google.com/search?q=link%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.target.com)

~~~
redorb
[https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/search?p=http://www.ta...](https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/search?p=http://www.target.com&fr=sfp&bwm=i)

is a better source, it shows 3.1mm incoming links...

[https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/search?p=http://www.ta...](https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/search?p=http://www.target.com&bwm=i&bwmo=d&bwmf=u)

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
If that were true, this would be the best-ranked site in the universe:
<http://ianab.com/trillion/1.html>

~~~
redorb
Except that those trillion pages have little incoming links ~ so they have no
"juice" or "pageRank" to pass. Target has 267k incoming links then
redistributes that via internal links / a while ago people started "link
sculpting" using 'no-follow' in the link <ahref> to take all the homepage link
juice and pass it to what they perceived as their better converting pages..
but google has since come out and said that wasn't a good thing to do...

~~~
byrneseyeview
Right. Having extra pages, versus extra content, is not specifically
beneficial. If that were the case, other sites would fill themselves with
specious stuff like empty search results pages.

------
almost
"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

