Wow. Around 2:14 of this video, Matt Cutts says Google “can sometimes use the Open Directory Project snippets” when populating snippets for URLs displayed in the SERPs. He then goes on to talk about how Google can also use that information to create a “better” title for URLs in the SERPs:
…Webmasters are probably not as used to the idea that we’re willing to find a better title as well. So if you have a bad title or a title that we don’t think helps users as much, we can try to find a better title – and one that we think will be an informative result, so that users will know whether that’s a good result for them to click on.
So I just wanted to give people a heads-up about that because they’re used to the things below the title changing, but they’re maybe not as used to the idea that the title itself can change in our search results as well.
Thanks for this video, Matt. The last part is fascinating. We saw that Bing was doing something like this back in early June.
One question: Is Google going to do my title tag SEO for me now? That would sure save me some time. 😉 I’m sure if I was Boser or Graywolf, I would have a big problem with this. I kinda do, but I’m too busy to write much more. I guess I’d really care if a page with no title tag could outrank my page after Google created a “better” title tag for that page. That would be upsetting. But I am confident in my SEO abilities. Now where was I?
The other day I saw a DomainNameWire post about Toys “R” Us redirecting its newly acquired domain, toys.com, and that toys.com had been “de-indexed” by Google. For those of you who have not heard the story, Toys “R” Us bought the Parent Company (eToys.com, BabyUniverse.com, ePregnancy.com) for ~$2 million. Then a couple of weeks later, Toys “R” Us paid $5.1 million for the toys.com domain, and now they are redirecting the entire toys.com domain and all of its URLs to the toysrus.com homepage. That’s right. Every toys.com URL is now pointing to the toysrus.com homepage. Was this a good move? Why did Toys “R” Us take this path with the toys.com domain? What are the SEO impacts of redirecting an entire site? Depending on your perspective, the answers to those questions can vary significantly. Let’s investigate some of the possible reasons behind this move (and maybe even some of the opportunities they missed by taking that route).
Obviously, the main goal was brand association.
Toys “R” Us wants to be the brand most associated with toys. For many of us, they have always been the top dog in the toys industry. Toys “R” Us has always been the first company I think of when I think of toys. FAO Schwarz is also up there, but let’s be honest: they are no Toys “R” Us. I mean, Toys “R” Us has like 600 stores in the US and 97,000 employees (thanks Wikipedia). Also making my unofficial best toy stores list is KB Toys. Oops. I have to remove them from the list because they got bought and liquidated in December 2008. With the demise of KB Toys, a giant void opened up in the brick-and-mortar store vertical. In terms of massive stores that have nothing but toys, Toys “R” Us and FAO Schwarz are the only big toy retailers left (well at least on my toy store list). In the end, Toys “R” Us rules the brick-and-mortar toy store roost. [Note: My apologies if I’m leaving out any other toy stores.]
Another goal of the domain acquisition: “free” direct navigation traffic.
Now that brick-and-mortar toy stores are going the way of the buffalo (not the dodo), toy companies must focus a lot of attention to the interwebs and intranets advertising. I imagine that the Toys “R” Us execs were drooling at the possibility of getting the highly-coveted, 4-letter domain toys.com. This would enable them to capitalize on all the direct traffic navigation to toys.com. I don’t know how many people are directly navigating to toys.com every day, but obviously Toys “R” Us wanted to route that traffic to toysrus.com. For those of you who may not know, the direct navigation industry is nothing to sneeze at. I applaud Toys “R” Us for outbidding everyone else for the toys.com domain. It’s a very aggressive move from an industry leader. Toys “R” Us is the most identifiable toy store brand and they own the generic keyword domain that is most associated with their brand. There are tons of companies who wish they could say the same. Now, what should they do with the toys.com domain? [Note: I’m still waiting to see who buys toy.com. It’s just being parked right now. What a shame.]
Toys “R” Us is obviously not a newcomer to the e-commerce game. The toysrus.com domain was registered in 1995, and they have had an online store since at least 1998. Furthermore, they have been running successful search marketing campaigns for years. As with any other company that’s been around for more than 50 years, Toys “R” Us has found out that the online world is full of aggressive, online-only e-commerce stores that know everything about utilizing all available channels and surviving online. Toys “R” Us is one of the few industry leaders that started early in the race to e-commerce websites, and they are a company that has succeeded in maintaining an online reputation that equals their top reputation in the brick-and-mortar world.
Awesome. But what about the redirects?
For the search term toys, Toys “R” Us is battling several well-knows toy brands and sites for the top spots in the organic rankings. Here are some of the other top 10 toy brands in the Google SERPs:
toysrus.com
etoys.com (owned by Toys “R” Us)
toys.com (owned by Toys “R” Us, no longer ranking)
lego.com
walmart.com
fisher-price.com
amazon.com
hasbro.com
There are certain times when the acquisition of a highly-coveted domain names like toys.com could really come in handy from the standpoint of expanding your exposure in the Google SERPs. Before the sale of toys.com to Toys “R” Us, toys.com was ranking #3 for the term toys in Google. Apparently, Toys “R” Us was not really concerned with (or maybe aware of) toys.com’s natural search rankings. After the purchase of eToys.com and Toys.com, Toys “R” Us owned 3 of the top 5 sites in the Google SERPs for the search term toys. For a generic search term like toys, having 3 of the top 5 sites is miraculous. But this scenario would not last long. At some point Toys “R” Us decided that it only needed to have 2 of the top 5 results.
Why did they redirect toys.com to toysrus.com?
Obviously I wasn’t in the room when Toys “R” Us decided to redirect the toys.com site to toysrus.com, but I would have loved to be a fly on the wall in that boardroom. I’m sure that a major point in the discussion was the increase in traffic and revenue to toysrus.com. If you redirect and entire site to toysrus.com, traffic and revenue will increase, and that will make everyone happy in the short run. The investment in a $5.1 million domain will have immediate returns. No questions about it. It’s a move that quickly impacts the bottom line. In today’s economy, who would argue against quick returns on a major investment?
On the other hand, I sincerely hope that someone brought up the nature of redirects to the upper management. I hope an SEO told them that Google, Yahoo, MSN and the other major search engines would follow the redirects, and then toys.com would no longer rank in the SERPs. Major search engines would begin to drop the pages that have been redirected via a 310 permanent redirect. The toys.com URLs would not be de-listed/de-indexed because of some sort of unethical SEO practices. Rather, the URLs would be dropped because of the standard definition of a 301 permanent redirect: 301 redirects tell the search engines that the page no longer exists and has been moved. Knowing that the URL has permanently moved to another active URL, the search engines will only keep the destination URL in their respective indices. The search engines are just following the directions that the webmaster set up with the 301 redirects. I hope someone told them all of that because it seems important to know that the 301 redirect solution would cause your brand to lose an awesome piece of real estate in the Google SERPs. That is a lot of free traffic to turn down.
Maybe one of the most influential arguments for redirecting the toys.com domain centered around the increase in domain authority that comes from redirecting one domain to another with the use of 301 redirects. We all know that link juice is the most important factor for today’s search engine algorithms. Imagine if we could take a domain like toys.com and redirect all of its URLs (and all of their inbound links) to toysrus.com. That would definitely have a major impact on the link authority of toysrus.com. That would be awesome. It would be a great move that would reinforce and solidify the toysrus.com domain to insure top rankings in the future. In a world where links are only getting more expensive, another major benefit of buying a domain is that you can capitalize on its link juice.
A linkdomain: check on Yahoo reveals that the toys.com domain only has 713 inbound links. Uh oh. That’s not very many links. Consider that toysrus.com has 357,260 inbound links. Yeah. The link juice from toys.com is measured in drops rather than in gallons. Anyways, given the nature of this new information, I’m not necessarily on board with the decision to redirect toys.com to toysrus.com.
Did they have to choose that option?
I am not completely disagreeing with the decision because I do know that there are other factors involved. Because the toys.com/etoys.com acquisition was very public knowledge, Google knows that Toys “R” Us owns all three websites. How likely is it that Google would list 3 sites from the same company in the top 5 results for a highly competitive search term? It’s not very likely at all. Well, unless you have a badass SEO. And unless the 3 sites are unique and have relatively-unique content. Toysrus.com and eToys.com have managed to maintain a unique focus. How could they then build out toys.com to be another toy-based site that can distinguish itself from the other 2 sites? Sounds impossible. Not really.
Maybe money became an issue. It’s a rough economy. Site development, marketing, advertising, hiring people, building a new site, asking for bailout money – all of these things cost money. With so much focus on the bottom line and with so many companies cutting budgets in 2009, perhaps this entire decision came down to money. At least I hope that’s what happened because I know of several SEOs that could have come up with a solid idea that could turn toys.com a site that drives a ton of traffic and money while offering a unique focus and maintaining a top 5 result in the Google SERPs. I mean, seriously. A shopping engine. A blog. A review site. Something. Anything is better than redirecting an entire site to one URL! I’m glad they mainly used 301 redirects (I have seen a lot of pages with 302 redirects still in Google’s index), but at least they could have matched up related product and category URLs from toys.com to toysrus.com. There are likely several achievable business models for the toys.com domain that could provide more visibility and profit for Toys “R” Us, but it’s obviously not in the cards right now.
What Now?
In the end, Toys “R” Us made an aggressive move that will drive brand recognition and brand association. They made a move that will deliver a lot of direct navigation traffic. They made a decision that will result in some link juice and link authority being transferred to toysrus.com. There’s probably some other stuff that they’ll get out of it, but this blog post is already too long. I don’t think it was a terrible decision. It’s not going to bankrupt the company. However, there are some huge opportunity costs. A top organic ranking is one. Organic search traffic is another. Revenue is another. Oh well. Good luck, Toys “R” Us. I wish you the best in 2009.
The Legend of Zelda was awesome! I remember opening it on Christmas Day back in 1987. It had a shiny golden box, and then the game itself was a brilliant, glowing masterpiece of golden plastic. Just take a look:
The Legend of Zelda golden cartridge
I had never seen anything like this. It was like opening up a golden ticket, but rather than a fattening journey through a chocolate empire, this golden ticket delivered instant access to the magical land of of Hyrule. For me, the greatest thing about this game was that it opened up my imagination like no other video game had ever done. I was used to games that only moved right-to-left or down-to-up, and those games made following the steps from beginning to end fairly simple. The Legend of Zelda was the first game where I remember getting involved in the story. I wasn’t riding Falcor and chasing the Nothing, but it was the first video game I ever played where I could not take things for granted. I remember wandering around forever looking for a certain level, and I ended up finding it by blowing up the side of a mountain on the other side of a stream. It’s as if the video game was teaching me to open up the boundaries of my mind. Secret passages in the mountain. Secret passages underneath tombstones. It was amazing to me. After all, Zelda was probably the 3rd or 4th Nintendo game I owned, and I never had more than 10 games. Regardless, I was still used to Atari games that placed playability and functionality over imagination and plot. [Note: Back in 1987, Nintendo games were like $60, and that was a lot of money back then. That still is a lot of money, but it seems like a crapload of money in 1987. Looking back, I’m surprised my parents even bought me 10 games through the years.]
Link battles in Level 1 of The Legend of Zelda
Another awesome facet of The Legend of Zelda was the fact that the main character was a little dude named Link. He starts off as just a regular boy, but through trials and tribulations he becomes a hero. Like any other 8-year-old boy, it was easy for me to imagine that I was Link, the hero of Hyrule. And as it was a game that considerably expanded my imagination, it quickly became a world that I could escape to. I mean, sure, homework and soccer practice were fun, but I could not wait to get home and turn on my Zelda game. I got to be a hero in a magical world where I could explore the limitless wonder that was Hyrule. Unlike other Nintendo games, I wasn’t forced to go one way. I could choose my own path. I could go left, right, up or down. I got to navigate the entire realm. And I got to defeat Ganon, the Prince of Darkness, and save Princess Zelda. For me, it was an adventure that I would not find in any other 8-bit game. [Note: I played several other RPGs, like Ultima, Dragon Warrior and Final Fantasy. Perhaps I liked Zelda so much because for me it was the original. I guess I’m just sentimental or something.]
Ok. That’s good and all, but why am I talking about The Legend of Zelda on an SEO blog? That’s a good question. Let’s see if I can provide an answer that makes any sense.
I am an SEO to the core. My being exudes a nerdy internet search aura. I eat, sleep and breath SEO. It’s not all I think about. There are a few hours each week when I watch Lost, 24 and House. Most of the time I’m thinking about SEO. While I’m thinking about SEO, I often notice similarities between SEO and seemingly-unrelated things in life (you might have noticed this fact from my posts about Walter Sobchak, Frogger and Grimlock). And since I’m nostalgic, I’m often thinking of events from my childhood. Today I was thinking about link building, and I pondered the future of SEO and the power of links. And then it hit me: Links are the undeniable rulers of organic search realm that is Google. And because I am a search marketer, when I think of the plural (links), I also start thinking of the singular (link).It’s like an SEO reflex or something! [Note: Link is the main character in The Legend of Zelda.]
Link defeats Ganon in his Death Mountain lair
As it turns out, The Legend of Zelda is a great metaphor for search engine optimization. Don’t believe me? Well check this out. Here’s how the Zelda characters would match up with important SEO concepts:
Hyrule = Google SERPs
Hyrule is a magical land that requires a lot of time to navigate and explore. Much like the Google SERPs, you won’t master Hyrule on the first day. Diligence and hard work is needed to master this landscape, which is highly varied and constantly changing (like the Google SERPs).
Ganon, the Prince of Darkness = PageRank, Google’s Natural Search Algorithm
Ganon is a badass. The first time you set foot in his lair, trepidation sets in. It’s a feeling like the one you get when you first set foot into the world of SEO. After the first step, you realize the size and scope of the SEO world. It’s intimidating and scary, but you will eventually learn to master many aspects of the game.
Princess Zelda = #1 ranking in Google
Until you defeat Ganon and get some top rankings for your clients, peace will not exist in your SEO world. Or in Hyrule. When you achieve a #1 ranking in Google, it’s a lot like rescuing the Princess from the grips of Ganon. All your hard work and long hours finally paid off, and everyone is cheering for you. If only Google had a “Congratulations, you’re #1” screen to celebrate your success. That would be cool.
Link rescues Princess Zelda
Triforce of Power = Basic SEO Principles
The story of Hyrule is cool. Ganon and his army steals the Triforce of Power, an artifact that bestows amazing strength. Princess Zelda takes one of the pieces, breaks it into 8 pieces and scatters throughout Hyrule’s secret dungeons. In order to defeat Ganon and rescue the Princess, Link has to find and reassemble those 8 pieces. Those 8 pieces remind me of the most basic SEO strategies. In order to win at SEO, you must have these 8 elements optimized: title tags, meta tags, keyword tags, H tags, Alt tags, Link title attributes, internal navigation, sitemaps.
Link = Text Links
Link was created to eventually defeat Ganon. It was going to happen. It was only a matter of time. No matter how many times the game changes, Link will find a way to rule Hyrule. The same thing goes for text links in the realm of SEO. We know that there over 200 signals that PageRank uses to determine rankings, but in the end, text links rule the world of Google SERPs.
Finally, Peace Returns to Hyrule.
Despite the message in the final screen, I never once believed that the story had ended. Now, go forth and prosper in your SEO realm. Whether it be ringtones, phentermine or gambling, I wish you luck in your endeavors.
