TikTok's Broken SEO is Flooding Search Engines

TikTok’s Broken SEO is Flooding Search Engines

11/12/2024

I noticed something interesting on Google today:

Google search results for "the title is clear, accurate, and uses" showing results from TikTok, all with the same description.

The pattern continues: Excerpt from page 10 of the search results

What’s going on with TikTok’s snippets?

Investigating

I tried clicking on one of the results to find the meta tags for myself in the page’s source, but it seems they only appear if you’re Google (or another crawler like Bingbot). Search bar in Safari developer tools showing 'Not found' for 'The title is clear'

So I changed my user agent to Googlebot… Screenshot of my browser, which says 'Forbidden' in plain text.

Ok 🙄

Inspecting

Google has a URL Inspector tool which allows you to see what Googlebot would see when scraping a page, which should be useful for something like this; however, it doesn’t allow inspecting urls on domains you don’t own. So let’s Google a workaround…

Duh, it’s so easy! Just redirect from your own domain!

Anyway, when Googlebot/Google’s page crawler accesses it, it looks like this:

“This information is Al generated and may return results that are not relevant”

With the following structured data: Screenshot of Google's URL Inspector tool showing structured data for the TikTok page, with three sections: name, description, and keywords. Each section has AI-generated suggestions for SEO, with a score and reasoning.

Conclusion

We can conclude that TikTok is experimenting with using a LLM (probably their own) for generating structured data, but it seems a step is missing in their process, and just raw JSON is being fed to search engines.