I have written about Maplin and its internet presence before – how they have an affiliate scheme where people can sell Maplin products on their personal web site. This is an acceptable way of trading, albeit not something I would do if I was a large established company and wanted to build my online sales and reputation. But I’m not a large company, so maybe I don’t know best, it just strikes me as short-termism – a way to generate some quick sales and raise its search engine profile.
Back to the headline question, which I won’t answer, instead, I’ll just explain what I’ve noticed. I’m always searching for products on Google, and more and more I see Maplin cropping up in the matches, with products I wouldn’t necessarily expect them to sell. When these matches are clicked, they take you to a Maplin search page with no results for the product in question. Just today, I did a search for the now, finally released, almost 2 years late Behringer BCD2000 and got Maplin as a match only to find that they don’t sell it.
I also noticed the “matching” search results for things they don’t sell.
I was looking for a vendor for the ‘K8000 computer interface board’ as I used it for my DIY robot project and wanted to make a possible affiliate link.
Maplin don’t sell it, but they like to pretend that they do. They came up No. 34 in a google search for “k8000″ but they came top of the list for the full title of “K8000 COMPUTER INTERFACE BOARD” I have also found several other things that they are pretending to sell.
The results we both found are obviously deliberate as someone has had to manually title the pages that are found. Searching “Behringer BCD2000″ returns a result which includes “MP3 CONTROLLER” in the title, so its definatley not one of thoes automated spam results.
I think that this probably does constitute search engine spam, and it sucks! Dirty tircks to raise your ranks in a search engine may work for a while, but it will no doubt leave them in a bad place if they contnue.
BMW found this out recently. They were using ‘doorway’ pages designed to trap searchers looking for “used cars”. Google blacklisted the pages they were tying to optimise and stripped them of rank.
This is a little worrying for me because of my affiliate links to Maplin. If they get punished for spamming, that leaves me linking to a ‘bad’ web site. This could in turn have a negative impact on my own site rank.
Whatever hapens its not going to be a big problem, but I just don’t like it. The only real way to rank well in the search engines consitantly it to have a well structured site and to povide something that people like. Ok so thats much much more difficult and time consuming than spamming, but it gives longer lasting results and it doesn’t annoy people.
I hate spammed search results. I’m competing with them all the time, but I’ll never resort to dirty tricks. Hard work pays off in the end. I’m keeping an eye on them.
Thanks for the comment Richard. Talking of search engine rankings being negatively affected, I have been hearing increasingly about renewing domains for more than a year to improve raking. What are your thoughts?
I understand the point that they make in that article about recognising “throw away websites”, but I doubt that it will have any impact on other sites. I excpect that search companies like Google will simply use the regestration period as an extra guide value. For most people it is simply not cost effective to pay far in advance for a domain.
If they implement this into ‘the algorithm’ it will also take into account how long the the site has been online for, inbound link QUALITY, and the other usual factors.
For example; A site may have been active for the past 10 years, but the domain owner only renews the domain on an anual basis. I’m sure that google would totaly ignore the domain registration period for such a site, as it would not realisticly reflect the legitamacy of the site.
I would assume that a multiplier factor would be used with the regestration period. This would only make it important under certian circumstances. Something like (Total Site Online Time) x (No. Pages) x (Inbound Link Q Factor) x (content to Ads or outgoing links ratio)
This way new sites with no inbound links and just a few pages might stand a better chance if the domain is registered for 10 years. This might show that there are intentions for growing the site into something larger, although if google does not see any growth then it would probably drop accordingly.
That article also mentions losing your domain within seconds if it expires. Most companies will remind you before the domain expires. It should not be any real problem if you are activley maintaining your site as you could easily renew you domain before it expires.
Such changes to the the system are just aimed at getting rid of rubish sites from your search results. Google wants to give us the most relevant results possible for any given word or phrase. It simply wouldn’t work if one site ranked higher than another, purely based on the domain registration period.
I currently run a website called Simpic Design and I would love to publish you article or atleast link to it. What do you think???
View it at
http://members.lycos.co.uk/simpicdesign/main_topic.php?news_select=4
I’v noticed this enough times to google it, which is how I found your page.
I tried pointing an online ‘search engine spam detector’ at the maplin home page, but it didn’t find anything suspicious.
They do state that ‘Any trick based on Javascript … [will evade their detector]‘ at the moment’.
http://tool.motoricerca.info/spam-detector/