Ocado blacklisted by Google?

Interesting.

I use www.marketleap.com tools to get this kind of info (search engine saturation, link popularity check and keyword verification) off a number of search engines - there also trend/history reports.

Ocado had 130 pages indexed on Google at the beginning of the year and now 0.

Do you know why they were blacklisted?

We’ve heard various rumours as to why - which might well be true but which we couldnt’ really repeat. However, you would imagine that it could only be beacuse of SEO malpractice (in the eyes of Google).

Interestingly, as a past customer of Ocado I noticed at the time that their site was frames-tastic and had ’will-not-rank-very-well’ written all over it. Equally, from a user perspective it was actually really quite good.

Take a look at http://www.ocado.com/webshop/common/Frameset.jsp - from an SEO point of view anything ending ’frameset.jsp’ would have me a little worried and none of their product pages have their own URLs as a result.

I have visions (pure supposition of course - I have no idea who Ocado have or haven’t used as agencies) that something like this happened:

Ocado - "We want an easier-to-use shopping interface for our customers"

Web agency - "Here you go, we’ve managed to get it all on one page (using frames) and it's really easy to use."

Ocado - "Great"

(a few months later)

Ocado - "Why aren’t we ranking in organic search as well as others?"

Web agency - "Ooo... dark art voodoo stuff that SEO..."

Ocado - "Can no-one help us?!"

(enter search marketing agency)

SEM agency - "For starters, you need to change the way the site is structured and how pages are served"

Ocado - "After the amount we’ve spent on our e-commerce engine and the site design and build? Surely there’s another way...?!"

SEM agency - "Well, there is a way, but..."

(The dark deeds get done. A few months later and Google’s blacklisted the site. Words are being had all round...)

On 13:29:15 1 July 2004 Loz wrote:

Interesting.

I use www.marketleap.com tools to get this kind of info (search engine saturation, link popularity check and keyword verification) off a number of search engines - there also trend/history reports.

Ocado had 130 pages indexed on Google at the beginning of the year and now 0.

Do you know why they were blacklisted?

Seems a similar thing is happening across the pond with a class action suit being brought against an SEO company for using unethical practices which have lead to their entire client list being wiped from Google - see http://www.isedb.com/news/article/953

On 15:17:56 1 July 2004 matt wrote:

Well, this is sure to cause a stir.  Yes, I agree, will certainly be fascinating to see how quickly Ocado can get themselves re-indexed by Google.  Will a bit of muscle and money get Google to change their tune.  And if so, does this show that Google really is beginning to shift from their position of "Here to give you best results regardless" to "Here to give you the best results regardless - unless you throw some money our way and please our shareholders".

Had a quick look on Alltheweb to see if Ocado had any dodgy pages linking to their main site: http://www.alltheweb.com/search?cat=web&cs=utf-8&q=link%3Awww.ocado.com&_sb_lang=any

Doesn’t show much.  Possibly they have been serving different content to search engines, but from looking at the number of pages indexed by Alltheweb, i would say not. Alltheweb search on Ocado within their domain

One thought, could one sabotage a competitor by creating a number of link farms, doorway pages etc. to a competitor’s site?

Will be fascinating to find out the reason why they were removed from the indexes.

Matt

On 12:25:09 1 July 2004 Ashley wrote:

We heard that Ocado had been blacklisted by Google and de-indexed.

So we tried a quick search on Google on Ocado...

No results directly from the Ocado web site.

So we tried seeing if any pages from the Ocado web site were indexed by Google.

Nothing there.

Looks like it might well be true then?

Which raises the obvious question - why?

We have some thoughts, but this looks set to turn into an interesting (albeit harsh) lesson in SEO best practice. If it is true it will be interesting to see how fast Ocado can get themselves back into those listings...

Ocado has some serious optimisation issues - including the frames one. They spoke to us the week it launched and our optimisation techies walked them through what would need to be done to the site to ethically fix it.  It entailed some serious recoding and they were not prepared to do it, but they were majorly upset when they found out how much work would be involved repairing their website.

Becuase of the size of their database we thought it was an obvious no brainer for long term value,  obviously however they did not.

We also explained to them that because they had not thought about algorythmic search they might suffer a lot of continuity errors - hense now landing on most pages means a user can't go anywhere, great for user experience and brand integrity.

The actual real number of indexed pages is not 3000+ but  755+/- (Google often seems to overstate the number of pages in its database)

Of these 755 pages there are only three main titles plus lots of blanks:
ocado.com
ocado information
ocado

So from a keyphrase, content optimisation perspective all these pages are next to useless.

I don't think they have been barred or that duplicate content is the issue becuase the number of pages indexed is farely consistent across all the servers. However a lot of the child frames have been indexed, both the product, shopping baskets and top menus and they are mostly all dead ends, empty or errors.

Pretty much it is a total mess and needs both cleaning up and optimising.

Sorry for the blatant plug: if there is anyone from Ocado reading this we are still keen to talk. Phone me and I will send you a spreadsheet of the way your website looks to 70%+ of internet users.

I suggest you also read our report about issues effecting you brand other than rankings: http://www.neutralize.com/about_us/releases/250504.htm

Teddie

_________________________________________
Neutralize (*\*)
Independent Search Marketing Services
T: +44 (0) 8700 630707
F: +44 (0) 8700 630708
E: teddie@neutralize.com
U: http://www.neutralize.com
_________________________________________