Saw a massive UK company doing this, is it risky/Google slappable?

So I was looking at long tails in a highly competitive UK niche. I saw one of the big players had targeted the long tail keyword so I clicked the title in Google expecting to see a nice 1000+ word page....

All they'd done is set this page to search all their existing content for this long tail and used those results to generate the page content.

--------------------------------------------------------------------
| Results on company X for long tail keyword |
| |
| 1. related title |
| snippet of text from previous article for |
| some page content |
| |
| 2. related title a little less |
| snippet of text from previous article for |
| some page content |
| |
| 3. not very related title |
| snippet of text from previous article for |
| some page content |
|------------------------------------------------------------------|

Yes that's an ASCII website. The very first on BHW I believe!?

Anyways, do we think this method will get shat on eventually by Google? Or is it already a know no no?

aw man, BHW fucks up my ASCII website! Anyways you get the idea....

I dont think there is anything to slap - if google are ranking it then they consider the content ok.
Just goes to show again the power of page/domain authority and how a page full of crap can rank

davids355 said:

I dont think there is anything to slap - if google are ranking it then they consider the content ok.
Just goes to show again the power of page/domain authority and how a page full of crap can rank

Click to expand...

do you think it would be considered auto-generated content?

It could just be a very low competition keyword...

What's the volume for the search term?

I would have thought that crawling search results would cause more issues than anything else. Are they actually putting these results pages into site maps or has it been crawled from somewhere else?

Ste Fishkin said:

It could just be a very low competition keyword...

What's the volume for the search term?

I would have thought that crawling search results would cause more issues than anything else. Are they actually putting these results pages into site maps or has it been crawled from somewhere else?

Click to expand...

Can't see the search volume now (thanks google!) but i'm pretty sure it is very low search volume. It is however in arguably the UK's most lucrative/competitive niche according to PPC costs that is. Can't find their sitemap but i'm pretty sure its been deliberately generated because when I search for terms the URL structure looks nothing like the long tail one. They've probably just ripped out the keywords from the Google suggest API.

high domain authority sites have the edge

andrew1978 said:

high domain authority sites have the edge

Click to expand...

thanks...what I'm trying to get at is do we think its a safe method for ranking long tails?

to me it feels like it goes against this

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2721306?hl=en

"Stitching or combining content from different web pages without adding sufficient value"

jamie3000 said:

thanks...what I'm trying to get at is do we think its a safe method for ranking long tails?

Click to expand...

Unique, helpful and relevant content is the only way considered safe. Garbage like that will eventually be outranked or slapped.

jamie3000 said:

to me it feels like it goes against this

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2721306?hl=en

"Stitching or combining content from different web pages without adding sufficient value"

Click to expand...

LOL you think google give a fuck about their own advice.

That's cute.

Send me the domain, I bet I can find the sitemaps

i think i know what is happening here. it looks like google's very own custom search engine. and you mentioned it ranks for longtail queries.... well, established websites ranking for longtail queries with their google custom search page is very normal

they will lose this ranking as soon as the query matures and true websites/pages begin to fill the position

o.k, so here's my question.

How can we scrape to find websites ranking for longtail queries with their google custom search page...it must leave a footprint, no?

I think its autogenerated and they may not be targeting it specifically.