Could not find target website in the results anymore. Either this was intentionally removed for being a hot topic or (imho more likely from what i have seen) google generally gives new content "opportunity window" on first page where if it to generate sufficient click throughs it gets buried; what you witnessed could have been that.
I would go as far to say any results page which is the result of an in site search should be removed, rarely if ever have I found any value from these pages through google.
Google will often show cooks.com search results for a search for "X X recipe," and these are typically the correct result, showing a dozen similar recipes for the dish I'm looking to cook.
I'm not really 'up' on involved rules with respect to web programming / interfacing with Apache, but is it standard practice to return a 404 when your search finds no hits? Technically it's not a 'page not found.'
Interesting: this story is apparently of enough concern that when i serch for "Exercise Bike Clearance" I get mostly articles talking about Target spamming Google.
if "we are sorry we couldn't find" + searchquery
then nofreetrafficforyou
I mean there are only a dozen or so ways for people say "we are sorry we tricked you into coming to our site with fake content", surely a company the size of Google can do a fix for this. Would eliminate overnight 90% of all those crappy fake search results
But that's not really feasible for 100+ languages, not to mention character sets, etc. Editorial doesn't really scale for Google at all.
For many of the smaller languages (i.e., outside the top 20 or so) Google only employs at most one native speaker who's tasked to work on search quality.
Except that those trillion pages have little incoming links ~ so they have no "juice" or "pageRank" to pass. Target has 267k incoming links then redistributes that via internal links / a while ago people started "link sculpting" using 'no-follow' in the link <ahref> to take all the homepage link juice and pass it to what they perceived as their better converting pages.. but google has since come out and said that wasn't a good thing to do...
Right. Having extra pages, versus extra content, is not specifically beneficial. If that were the case, other sites would fill themselves with specious stuff like empty search results pages.
I wish I could dig up the source, but someone claimed that Google was issued a patent for a method of using editorial preference in their ranking algorithm. The guess is that they use it to give preference to large brand-name websites. In general, this is understandable, when you're entering shopping queries in google the national brands are more relevant than their horrible business-unit-based website organization would normally have them rank. And, as the article points out, there are exceptions.
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-spam-illuminates-the-algos...
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-googles-rankings-algorithm-ha...