I have to be honest. I never thought I was going to do a lot of research on Google for big fashion brands. I mean, I’m always wearing cheap things, because I prefer to spend money on technology and music.
Both for work and for passion on topic, I’m looking a lot to first positions in the SERPs for big brands and I’m having a lot of fun, seeing what kind of spammy and crappy sites Google is presenting to me.
So , here we go. This post has more sense for italian people reading this, but still I wanna write in English because I have to improve the language 🙂
I was searching for “ugg australia” on Google.it.
So, as expected, first result is the official site. No surprise here.
But what is the second result? For someone who does not know about spammy results and trust on Google (let’s say that could be my sister, the same person who could eventually buy boots – notice I don’t have a sister) , there is a site that HAS to talk and probably sell a lot of UGG. why? look at the result:
So the URL has “ugg australia” on it, the title is full of “ugg australia” and there is even written “sito ufficiale” (it means “official site”) and the description is full of “ugg australia” as well. And this site is just under the real official site, so it has to be good. You trust in Google, right my dear sister?
So then, let’s have a look inside.
It seems nice. A lot of boots, images, and it’s updated too, since it says “le novita’ di dicembre” (it means “december new products” ) . But then I started to have some doubts when I went to the section “chi siamo” (meaning “who we are”).
My first reaction was: “WHAT?????????” . My second reaction was “This is funny!”. The thing is written in really bad italian, not even they used “google translate” because it’s really bad. I don’t even know how to translate this in English, because it will lose the real fun . But trust me, it’s really bad.
Then. Another thing I saw wrong in the site: there was Western Union as payment method. Now, a lot of spammy and scum site are using this payment method, so it’s a bad signal .
Then I went back clicking on “Casa” that in italian means “House” (they translated bad even this simple things, from “home”). I took a look to all the other sections of the site and the translations are really bad but funny at the same time.
But look even to the URL: why you put “…italias” ? ITALIAS? what’s that supposed to mean?
And the metas? here we go:
<meta name="keywords" content="ugg australia,ugg australian,ugg australia sito ufficiale,ugg australia italia,ugg australia boots,ugg australia originali,ugg australia shop online" /> <meta name="description" content="ugg australia,ugg australian,ugg australia sito ufficiale,ugg australia italia,ugg australia boots,ugg australia originali,ugg australia shop online" />
Really spammy way of creating metatitle and metadescription, don’t you think?
So it’s funny for sure discovering this type of site, but it scares me a bit because people who are not so much into scam sites could really buy from them, spending money, or giving away their mails and credit card data. My sister could be one of them, my young aunt too (not my mother because she does not like UGG boots).
This site is on the second position when Google.it is showing results for your query, and this is really bad. I know it will disappear (really hope so) but still it makes me nuts because sometimes trusted site are not ranking, even if they are doing all the things at the light of the day.
I don’t about Google in other countries, but Google.it has serious problems with big brands, with a lot of crappy sites ranking on first positions.
I will keep talking about these sites, just to warn you and because actually it’s really fun. Moreover, it makes me think how much important is to optimize the site for the users , even if Google is not ranking you. It’s only matter of time, and you will win. So, proud to be an SEO for these reasons. And as Gianluca Fiorelli once said in a tweet, “SEOs are making internet a better place” (or something like this).
This post was written listening to Martyn’s “Ghost People”