My bubble just got invaded - and hard

Not altogether impressed when I did a cursory search for a disappeared website from a small charity. It was the day after IDAHOT. Surely today of all days, it would be OK to be gay?

Apparently not:

Small websites come and go, of course, but this is harsh! You're only seeing the first six results here, but pretty much THE ENTIRE FIRST PAGE OF GOOGLE is results from Christian websites, which are far from clear on whether being gay is OK - even if they're nominally supportive. Several are in the love the sinner camp. Some are firmly telling you it isn't. There are a couple of equivocal news stories. But bar the Being Gay is OK colouring book, the whole thing smacks of bible study groups lead by sweaty celibates desperate to love the sinner, save your soul and bring you back to Sunday school.

Thank Oprah for the one exception. One item had squeaked past the seo-optimised bible-bashing search flooders; vlogger Doug Armstrong with "It's Okay to be gay (song), which is actually quite sweet in a vloggery kinda way, and does also accurately return on the search phrase "being gay is ok".

searching for yoga mats, sorted by price

I was trying to find a yoga mat on a leading online everything store (birthday present rather than for personal use) and after the usual frustrating first five minutes of trying to hone the search to actually include yoga mats my intended gift victim would enjoy, set the sorting to price high to low. Yoga mats topped out at a relatively modest £5K+, which shows how much the algorithm price wars have dropped off in recent years. In fact, a lot of the ads were for legitimately expensive items like inflatable and ultra-padded cheerleading mats, giant yoga mats to cover an entire room, and  yoga mat trolleys. Still a few people kicking it old-school though, with the list topped by three identical and utterly ordinary products priced in the thousands.

But it was when I set the pricing low to high (looking for carry straps I think) that the real surprise occurred. There were two or three yoga mat carry straps, but everything else was, I kid you not, teeny tiny tacky lacy strappy undies illustrated by all manner of pictures of professionally pleased to see you ladies. I was in the grip of a big EEEK already (mainly at the thought of the ads that would now be chasing me across the internet) when I spotted that adult items had been excluded from the search. Well, thank heavens for that, I suppose.

But what the heck is happening here? Time for five minute's thought:

• Hypothesis #1: Some SEO scamp has tagged all the products in the store (it is all one store)  with Yoga Mat, presumably on the grounds that ladies who like yoga may also like skimpy pants.
• Hypothesis #2: It is common practice to massively multiply tag penny items, on the assumption that people just go into a click-buy haze when they see such bargains.
• Hypothesis #3: There is some alternative use for yoga mats of which I am not aware.

I clicked through to one of the more innocuous items to check it out, and what's been done is either sort of clever, in an annoying sort of way, or a result of automatic categorisation having gone wrong. It's also possible it's an exploitation of a known weakness, so essentially both.

Under special offers, possibly because there is no-where else to go when most of what you're selling is retailing at £0.01+ p+p, the seller has simply linked back to some site search pages, including best rated yoga mat reviews among  other outdoor and fitness categories. The category assigned, Sports > Outdoors > Fitness > Yoga > Mats, appears to have been lifted from this non-information in the special offer category.

While the seller is a mere # 69,166 in the Sports > Outdoors category, they are a surprisingly high #384 in Sports > Outdoors > Fitness > Yoga > Mats, suggesting that for some yoga fans at least, hypothesis #1 (or potentially, for some lingerie fans, hypothesis #3) does hold.

Hypothesis #2 I discarded by running a few more searches (shoe stretchers, pepper grinders, sugar mice, yoga bricks, door mats, watch straps, exhaustive search run fans). No other search terms had suffered this mass lingerie invasion.

Right then, onto the incorrect product information feedback forms.

The reasons your website redacted.com is not performing well

The sheer giddy brio of it. The email came breezing into my inbox, purporting to tell me the ten reasons my website was not performing well.  So far, so ordinary. But here's the twist; the website in question was retired over three years ago.

Given that it is part of recent history, and that there is a new website doing much the same thing, the old domain name is still very much owned and earning its keep, deep links carefully redirecting to new content on the new site, the old world seamlessly subsumed into the foundations of the new. So the domain name has an owner and that'll have an owner email address attached, which is doubtless how I got on the list. But why was it sent to me for this web address and no other*?

I think I may have fallen victim to an algorithm. One which looked for owners of websites that seem not to be doing too well on google. And of course it's not going to be doing well on Google; all it's doing is sending all the old readers to the new domain name.

Google does know, of course. In fact, after the last redesign (with a little work from the developers and, er, me setting up a hundred or so redirects) Google had me showing a good face on the relevant terms within 48 hours. It was breathtaking. And a human check would quickly identify the clear data footprint of several sites knocked together, their domain names steadily, one by one, pointing to the survivor site as the others winked out one by one, too specialised or duplicatory to survive the rationalising web.

The content of the email was both fretfully pushy and link-farm generic, a few technical SEO terms thrown in, all wrapped up in a phishy sort of chumminess. The complete lack of company name and multiple other red flags would weed out all but the most busy and naive. I particularly liked the note that they had a host of "ethical" techniques - hinting none-too-subtly that there might also be unethical services available. It assumed I was working in sales, which is really just the business equivalent of saying "my dearest friend".

I batted it out of the joint mailbox at speed rather than reporting it back to the spam filter which should have caught it in the first place. Regretting that now. Hopefully many of the other people on the list reported properly.

*My email address/es is/are linked to ?maybe eight? web addresses. I probably forgot a few.