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Google’s John Mueller answered a question on Bluesky about why an e-commerce page with minimal content is ranking, illustrating that sometimes optimized content isn’t enough.

E-Commerce Search Results

A person posted their concerns about an e-commerce site that was ranking in the search results with barely any content. In fact, the domain that was ranking redirects to another domain. On the face of it, it appears like something is not right. Why would Google rank a landing page about a domain name transfer, right?

Why would Google rank what is essentially a landing page with virtually zero content for a redirected domain?

Why A Landing Page Ranks

The company with the landing page had acquired another company and they subsequently joined the two domains. There was nothing wrong or spammy going on, one business bought another business, it happens every day.

The person asking the question dropped a URL and a screenshot of the landing page and asked:

“How does Google think this would be the best result and also, do you think this is a relevant result for users?”

Google’s John Mueller answered:

“It looks like a normal ecommerce site to me. They could have handled the site-migration a bit more gracefully (and are probably losing a lot of “SEO value” by doing this instead of a real migration), but it doesn’t seem terrible for users.”

Site Migration

Mueller’s comment about the site migration was expanded further.

He posted:

“Our guidance for site migrations is at https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/site-move-with-url-changes . What they’re doing is a “soft or crypto redirect”, and they’re doing it “N:1″ (meaning all old pages go there). Both of these make transfering information about the old site hard / impossible.”

Sometimes Google ranks pages that seem like they don’t belong. But sometimes the site rankings make sense when looked at from a different perspective, particularly from the perspective of what’s good and makes sense for the user. Rankings change all the time and it could be that the rankings for that page could go away after a certain amount of time. But waiting for a competitor to drop away isn’t really a good SEO strategy. Google’s Danny Sullivan had some good advice about differentiating a site for better rankings.

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