3 Big Brands with Big SEO Boo Boo’s

Sometimes big brands are so big that when it comes to an online presence they only manage to get in their own way. How do I mean? Here are 3 examples of big brands making SEO mistakes that could be hurting them online.

TJ Maxx

I discovered this one not wearing my SEO hat, but in my role of a woman going on vacation soon.  I Googled “cheap bathing suits” and followed a referring link from a web page listed in the top ten for the phrase. An action I imagine hundreds or thousands of other people have taken. The link I followed landed me on this URL.

http://www.tjmaxx.com/index.asp

Ugh, as an SEO I hate that, but occasionally there are good reasons for keeping a /index version of a page. But there’s never a good reason for what I found when I got there, which this was:

Ahhh!! What is this?! Now, I know enough to scrap the index and go to the home page…but does everyone who visits Tjmaxx.com? Or would most people simply assume the site was down temporarily and go elsewhere? Adding insult to SEO injury, this stark, blank 404 page offers no assistance to a poor lost soul.  So instead of helping a visitor get to another page, by way of a site map or other links, this empty landing space basically says to would be customers: “Figure it out yourself or go away”.

Then my curiosity got the better of me, if one top ten ranked page for “Cheap bathing suits” links to this page then how many others do too…

I nearly had a heart attack.

That’s over TWO THOUSAND lost back links for TJMaxx. Just to put this into perspective, TJMaxx has approximately 31,000 links to their domain which means that 2,500 links, is 8% of their total link portfolio. EIGHT PERCENT of their back links go to a 404 page. The saddest part is that a simple 301 re-direct could salvage the power of those back links and send visitors the the correct page.

Reebok

Ok this was my first clue that something might not be right:

Notice anything missing? The little link next to “Similar” that’s supposed to say “Cached” perhaps?  But I didn’t want to pass judgment right away, so I clicked on Reebok.com. It forces you to select a language and a country, so clearly geo-targeting is at work here. Ok, so that means that the final landing page for a visitor like me, an English speaker from the US, would be

http://www.reebok.com/US/

So, this page SHOULD be the page which is cached, right?

Uh-oh.  Un-cached main pages are usually not a good sign…So I looked further. I mean if I ran a site command I should find some Product pages or something cached right? Well…

How is this even possible? Wait…no they couldn’t have…

http://www.reebok.com/robots.txt

Oh yeah. They did. Apparently not only does Reebok not care about SEO they seem to have blocked their site from being indexed with their robots text. Well that explains a lot…except WTH they were thinking!

Ok so what does this all mean? Is this a crisis for Reebok? Well, it SHOULD be, and for a smaller less known brand whose robots.txt blocked indexing it WOULD be. But thanks to Big Brand politics and their branded terms they still live, rank and prosper. Reebok ranks for their name and keywords like “Reebok Shoes” and “Reebock Apparel” But they don’t rank in the top 10 for “Athletic Shoes” “Running Shoes” or “Sports Shoes” (which they are paying for an ad for btw)

I can’t help but think about their bottom line. The cost of the website, the cost of their PPC programs, the lost profit due to missed opportunities, you’ve got to wonder if, in the long run, it would have been cheaper just to create pages that would get cached in the first place.

Prada

It’s no secret that high fashion favors form over function when it comes to clothing, shoes and accessories, but apparently Prada uses the same philosophy in regard to its website. When shopping for “Handbags” one site in the top 10 caught my eye. Their listing stood out from the others, but not because of its super catchy meta-copy, no it was actually the LACK of a description that I noticed.

Interesting, choice to opt out of a meta description, but at least the page is cached. Right? Well, technically. Clicking on the “Cached” link took me to a cache of a big, blank white page. And the text-only version gave me some really useful advice:

Thanks, I’ll get right on getting that flash player.

So, basically there’s no text at all behind this entirely flash based site and so Google has only cached a big white, empty home page. To see if any pages on the rest of the site fared any better, I ran a site command. The results?

The top didn’t look good:

The bottom looked even worse:

Omitted results after only 6 pages? Really? Oh and by the way, the 6 pages are comprised of the Homepage, 2 videos, 2 PDFs and an XML file. Super.

So how in the world does this site rank in the top 10 for a phrase like “handbags”? Well Google was kind enough to help me out with that too, telling me:

Yeah but How many sites having to do with hand bags link to Prada.com? Oh..

…well that makes more sense.   I guess when you have 85,000 back links and 10% of them come from pages which make some reference to a hand bag, you can get ranked for the phrase based on that contextual relevance alone.  Unfortunately, back link strength like that tends to be a luxury only afforded to big brands.

But what does this all mean, aside from being more evidence of big brand nepotism? Well it means that sometimes a big brand can get back link lucky, even on a keyword like “hand bags”, without having the words, or any words for that matter on it’s cached page.

Fashion designers are renowned for taking risks and all, but this seems extreme. Having an all Flash site with a blank cache for a home page and most pages lost in the realm of “omitted results” is relying pretty heavily on branding.  As far online marketing strategies go, it’s a gamble to say the least.

So maybe Prada, who charges a couple of grand per purse doesn’t care about ranking for phrases like designer clothing, sunglasses or shoes because they rank for their name and the occasional anomaly like “handbags”. But you’d think with a single handbag going for $1500 they might be able to spend that much a month on SEO…but then again… maybe it’s just not fashionable to care about your rankings.

And what of it?

The fact that these big brands don’t care to engage in SEO probably won’t matter much in the end to these billion dollar multinational corporations. On the strength of their brand names alone, they will survive without it but, what a waste. For them. For the rest of us, it translates to opportunity.

See these big brands, that don’t care to sweat the small stuff means that little guys, online businesses that aren’t Goliaths of corporate America can still make it big on line. By learning how to use search engines to our advantage, we can compete and win. But the time to act is now, before the sleeping giant wakes up.

Please share your thoughts on my findings. Is there something I missed? Have you seen other situations like these?

Tagged as: Bad SEO, Big Business SEO, Learn SEO, SEO Mistakes