It was the talk of the town: in late February, ToysRUs bought Toys.com at auction for $5.1 million. Most bidders dropped out of the auction at $3 million, leaving ToysRUs and domain holding company National A-1 to battle it out for hours until one emerged victorious.

In the words of the Washington Post, “ToysRUs really didn’t have much choice. If it wants to be the first thing people associate with toys it really couldn’t afford to allow anyone else to own that domain, even in this economy.”

As a result of their $5.1 million investment, ToysRUs could be found at spots #1, #2 and #4 on Google (if you searched for the keyword TOYS).

A mere three weeks later, that’s no longer the case (clearly $5.1 million doesn’t last as long as it once did).

DomainNameWire is reporting (and a Google.com search for TOYS confirms) that Toys.com has been de-indexed by Google.

Why? What heinous crime did ToysRUs commit?

Simple — and sad really. Type in Toys.com and you’ll be forwarded to ToysRUs.com.

Makes perfect sense from a traditional marketing perspective: “they’re looking for toys, we’ll take them straight to us.”

Unfortunately, direct forwarding is a No No in the land of the search engines. Google and its cousins are looking to deliver search results that meet their customers’ needs — and that means site content that’s of significant merit, not merely acting as a pointer to another site.

As DomainNameWire noted, “the value of Toys ‘R’ Us’ $5.1M purchase of Toys.com has [now] been relegated to type-in traffic and potentially some of the inbound links to Toys.com.” That’s probably not exactly what the ToysRUs execs who okayed the $5.1 million bid had in mind.

Still, we probably shouldn’t be too surprised. Big companies, it turns out, aren’t too good at this Search Engine Optimisation stuff. In fact, the most recent study of the search skills of the Fortune 500 (“Natural Search Trends of the Fortune 500“, Q4 2008) by Conductor Inc. revealed that the 500 spend ten times as much every day as ToysRUs spent on its Toys.com acquisition — and with similar results.

The research reveals that:

• In Q4 2008 the Fortune 500 as a group spent approximately $51 million / day on 88,792 keywords – yet only 20.82% of these keywords rank in the top 100 natural search results.
• Only 1.41% of the domains (not companies) surveyed showed significant number of their terms in the top results. All of these positive domain scores were offset by other owned domains with significant visibility issues.
• 46.76% of Fortune 500 companies have very low or non-existent visibility for their most advertised keywords.

Not so good. Clearly a little more education is required on the subject of “Ye Ancient And Honorable Art Of The Search Engine”.

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