SEO Whistleblower

Moosejaw Likes To Spam About North Face Jackets

The White Sombrero — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 19:03:51 +0000

Moosejaw.com is a popular apparel site for outdoor adventurers. While Moosejaw does sell their own branded products, there is one brand that they are truly going after, The North Face. Besides placing North Face first in their title tags (which I have no issue with), Moosejaw takes this a little overboard by spamming a large paragraph of North Face gibberish on the bottom of every page.

Moosejaw Spams about The North Face Jackets

While this is not a tactic I recommend, Moosejaw can be hurting itself by placing this block of irrelevant copy on every page. This includes other brand pages like Marmot. This dilutes the effectiveness of the tactic with duplicate content and may confuse search engines on to what every page is about.

Though Moosejaw does do a lot of things right on their site, I just needed to call out the one big spammy piece of crappy content on their site.

Moosejaw does rank #10 for “North Face” in Google, but it is for their homepage. Their major competitor, Altrec.com, is #5 (but the first e-commerce site) and the listing takes you right to their North Face page. I am guessing Altrec converts better because of that. Moosejaw, if you’re going to be spammy, at least convert.

Is “Search Index Page Description” the new Keywords Tag?

The White Sombrero — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 13:24:26 +0000

Quiksilver, and many of the other brands (Roxy, DC Shoes), use an interesting tactic for relevant content. On the bottom of all their pages they use the phase “Search Index Page Description.” When clicked, it expands into a list of keywords and common misspellings.

Tag Closed:

Quiksilver Spam Closed

Tag Open:

Quiksilver Spam Open

But when I went to Google to research why this phrase is used, my eyes were opened to a network of over a million sites (or pages) that use this same term and spammy SEO method.

1,150,000 Listings in Google

I found a blog post from Adam Dexter about Patagonia doing the same thing. His post was from October 2008. Was Patagonia the first to do this, I don’t know. But I find it amazing that companies that can afford $50k for a good SEO, instead go with some spammy content.

Patagonia Spam

Out of the millions of sites, Piragis.com’s attempt at SEO copy made me laugh the most. They basically admit it is spam, then say it’s good reading.

“Search Index Page Description for the Machines that help you find us. Not necessarily bad reading either.”

Piragis Spam

HAHA, ok. At least they got a chuckle out of me.

Why do so many reputable online retailers Spam? Is this a tool or service that inserts this into all these pages?

Overstock.com Over Emphasizing Keywords and Sneakily

The White Sombrero — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 15:24:01 +0000

Anyone who SEO’s e-commerce websites knows how hard it is to build relevant content. The newest trend is to add content to the bottom of pages, below the products.

I understand not wanting the content above the products. This pushes the products down on the page and makes them less visible to the consumers. Many e-commerce customers are window shoppers and do want to see the products up at the top. To get any indexable content on a page, SEO’s need to place the content at the bottom of the page.

Overstock.com does this well, except when you start to peel away the layers and code, you can see they overdo it just a little to push a large amount of keywords they are going for.

First, if you look at the HTML, we can see that they actually call the containing

tag “seoBox”. If you look deeper into the code, you can see they use a lot of tags. This is not visible in the browser.

Overstock.com SEO Content HTML

If you pop open firebug and add some css style to the tag, you will see everything come to life.

Overstock.com SEO Content Exposed

I understand you want to separate the presentation layer (css) from the code (html) and the tag isn’t a presentation tag or mean bold or italics. My issue is on the mass usage (21 in total) of this tag in 4 short paragraphs. This is sneaky. It probably works too. Since the keywords all focus on living room furniture, each keyword phrase may help the others in achieving long tail success.

Do you think it is over done or is this perfectly legit? How well does this tactic work?

Does TMZ Keyword Stuff URLs?

The White Sombrero — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 14:43:03 +0000

Taking a look on the TMZ site, I found it strange that the URL uses a ton of words in it. Take for instance the death of Corey Haim.

http://www.tmz.com/2010/03/10/corey-haim-dead-died-death-lapd-overdose-corey-feldman-lost-boys-two-coreys/

So we have the terms

Corey Haim

Dead, Died, Dead

LAPD

Overdose

Corey Feldman

Lost Boys

Two Coreys

Or even take this Tiger Woods story. I think there are more words in the URL than there are in the page itself.

http://www.tmz.com/2010/03/19/tiger-woods-elin-nordegren-home-disappears-mistresses-joslyn-james-text-messages/

Though this is not black hat, it is a little spammy and not natural looking. Though I am sure it works to some degree, it is a little over optimized. What do you think?

Note: Bill Sebald originally posted an article on this over on his Greenlane SEO Blog.

J.Crew is Hiding Relevant Content

The White Sombrero — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 14:32:35 +0000

J.Crew is a popular retailer known for its higher end preppy fashion. But in the SEO world, they are known as content cloakers. When you go to www.jcrew.com, there is more than meets the eye.

The J.Crew Homepage, as of today, looks like this:

J.Crew's Homepage is Hiding Text

But J.Crew is being sneaky and hiding content that this homepage Flash does not actually contain. The first way to detect this is to shut off JavaScript and browse to the page. You will notice some text appear on the screen and then redirect to this page.

J.Crew does a sneaky redirect to hide it's cloaking

What was that HTML copy we saw? Why did it flash up on the screen and then disappear? Well, using the Web Developer Tool Bar in Firefox, dropdown “Disable”, turn on “Disable Meta Redirects”, then go back to the homepage. Whammo! A hidden page full of optimized HTML content.

J.Crew's Hidden Text Revealed

Now I understand that many E-Commerce companies do not want ugly text on their pages. They pay top dollar for models that look like they are underage heroin addicts in fancy clothing and what that to shine. But if that is the choice your company is making, don’t try to cloak the content. Give the same experience to the search engines as you do the average user. You are J.Crew, why cheat?