This is more of a rant. As you probably know, I own large size shoe retailer 2BigFeet.com. I frequently check our rank in the major search engines for terms such as “large shoes”, “large size shoes”, “large men’s shoes”, etc.
Today after running my regular monthly report I followed it up by actually searching a few of the terms on Google and Yahoo! to see who was above us (we have first page rankings for almost every major term we track).
When I searched for “large mens shoes” on Yahoo! the #1 result is a search page on Target.com. It’s a dynamic search results page, which I have no problem with. The problem is that the actual search results have anything BUT large shoes.
The results? 3 watches, a belt, 2 pair of insoles and ONE pair of shoes, which is not available in large sizes (it’s only available in two sizes – small and large).
How did Target get a #1 rank for this term? There is no content on the search results that would lead me to believe they got it from keywords on the page. I can’t imagine there are actually backlinks to their search results with the anchor text “large mens shoes.”
I completely understand when one of our competitors gets ahead of us in search ranking… at least the customer is finding what they are looking for. But when completely random results are shown above our site for no apparent reason, I have to wonder why.
