Posted by Mercury Thread | Posted in Google | Posted on 14-05-2010
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over the past couple of weeks I had a problem with one of my blogs the DNS and everything went to pot. So I’ve rest it up on a new host and as it had links pointing to it Google nicely spidered the domain with the empty installation of WordPress on it. No big deal – add some old content (no back up so I hacked through the cache pages) and the ping will kick in and get it spidered. At least that was the thought.
Googles cocked it up – no biggie just now but kinda weird results coming out which gives a little insight into something I know about and have seen before but not on one of my sites. So I’m having a look for the site name (“discover whisky”) and sub pages are higher than the homepage appear. A touch strange but not overly expected – but it had the new homepage last night when I pinged some stuff out. Que cera – more DC madness but for May 2010 not unusual.
But above my site in the SERPs is a listing for a different website! no reference to my site at all.
Discover Whisky Cache
Other Site Cache
The images are a wee bit small but you can see it’s the same page of content – and having a look Google has indexed loads of ‘em. But you will see the same domain is listed within the wee grey box at the top (you may need a telescope but the full siuze images are clearer if you click on the thumbs).
The kinda cool/dodgy/mistake in all of this is the way that Google appears to be indexing duplicate pages – I mean 100% duplicate pages. In that it’s giving every page of this sort the same URL reference string. Ever wondered what that funny string of random characters was on a cache result: strings like “q=cache:4m23wQS3MZAJ:www.discoverwhisky.co.uk” in this segment of the URL for the cache page? It’s a page reference (of some sort). And my whisky blog homepage has the same bloody reference as the other site: “q=cache:4m23wQS3MZAJ:kellyguimont.com”. So for example the URL http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:4m23wQS3MZAJ:www.google.co.uk/ gives you the same cache page despite the domain being different.
It doesn’t matter what you change the domain to in this string it’s always the same page that will be returned within the cache page.
And so the reason for the issue becomes clearer – when trying to ascertain whats going on my domain has the links and this other one has the content ownership. The same issue you get when an affiliate steals your content whacks it on their site and get’s you kicked out of Google – or it could be a dodgy SEO company doing it to you by ways of a ‘negative seo’ campaign (something which one day I may go into at some length on this site).
On a number of cache requests since may day update I’ve seen the URL reference part of the string being wrong and no cache page being returned. So this may just be an extension of this issue.
Anyway I thought some folks may find this duplicate content indexintg issue kind of interesting or just a bit freaky. Any additional thoughts let me know in the comments.
Posted by Mercury Thread | Posted in Google | Posted on 25-03-2010
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It’s very rare that I’m on Google.com but today I had to go and help someone with some queries and whilst they were typing I saw a strange result. As they were typing in the brand they were researching up popped a link within the Google suggestion box (this is not something I’ve been able to replicate on Google.co.uk yet).
EEk - when did they start adding links to the suggestions drop down menu on Google.com
This aint the actual search they were doing but one of a range of intercepts in the drop down I found.
Triggering the link in Google suggest
It would appear from what I’ve seen so far that it’s really only brand searches which trigger the addition of the top ranked natural search result within the suggest drop down. Brand searches I’ve located so far include:
Anyone seen any others?
Cheers to Paul from the PPC team @ Equator Glasgow for reducing my ignorance in this matte
In recent weeks I’m sure you’ll have seen Chameleon Search in the SERPs and generally you’ll have found it useful. That said recently I’ve found a strange little thing going on with the keyword ‘tenders‘.
The Result set asks me if I meant to search for “EastEnders”!!!
This seems completely off the wall and strange but I guess thats what you get when Google try and run some automation on language analysis. You get mistakes. Maybe its a stange UK thing (like “search engine optimisation” and “search engine optimization“) and we’ll have to get used to it.
My main thought is that there seems to be no feedback loop on this. How do you say that as an average human being you feel that “tenders” is in no way related to “eastenders”?
Cheers to Andy for the heads up and good luck with optimising the word tenders – only an extra three places to go for that site you’re working on.
Related Blogs
Posted by Mercury Thread | Posted in Blogging, Google, IMJUK, Links | Posted on 16-05-2008
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Getting your pages cached by Google can be a nightmare at times. You’ve updated a web page and then you sit back and wait, wait some more and after more waiting GoogleBot decides index and cache your updated web page. It’s a problem that Dunkin’ Donuts had recently. They had a free iced coffee day in their branches put it on their website – but it was invisible in their search rankings as the page was not cached – GrokDotCom have posted on this recently.
Traditionally Google would index, and cache, your website based upon the number of links and the resulting PageRank of your webpages. Pages with more links and/or PageRank would be reindexed and cahced more frequently than pages with less links and/or PageRank.
It is possible to make changes to your website to help Google cache your website more often.
Checking your SEO rankings in multiple data centres can be a useful thing to have a look at. Showing you how your rankings are in variuos Google data centres (DC) at the same time. As Google does a rolling update of its data taking DC into and out of their active configuration to be updated. Sometime the DC you’re getting info on isn’t using the most recent set of data. This is espescially useful when google are carrying out an algorithm update or during technology changes – as you can see the changes rolling out across DC.
Google Data Center tools on the web
McDar has traditioanlly been the palce to go and check out results. It allows you to check by IP block for results. I like the way the results are outputted but you can only check about 6 DC on one screen.
Bill just sent me a link to a new DC checking tool – they need to do some work on the output of the results as they scroll down for about half a mile. But you get loads of differing DC checked at the on time.
If anyone knows of any other tools that do this job stick them in the comments below and I’ll have a squizz.
Posted by Mercury Thread | Posted in Email Marketing, Firefox, Google | Posted on 28-03-2008
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I was just chatting to Nick Duddy @ Equator and he was telling me about the ‘Gmail Grimace‘ thing going on over at the Email Standards Project. I’ve recently been getting more and more into Email Marketing as a way to generate sales and have been amazed at the difficulties that email marketers are having with different mail clients have with emails (think IE Vs Firefox web design problems on a far larger scale and your probably still not close to the problems they can have). Can you imagine having to do all your styles inline and design in tables – its so retro.
They even have a gmail Grimace Flickr Group – which is cool. At last something on Flickr which actually interested me!
For a while I’ve been thinking more and more that Matt Cutts, aka Google Guy, blog is becoming less relevant to me. It’s became a mecca for lots of non-seo noise that is starting to block out the good stuff that he used to post about Google and SEO.
In the past he posted some really cool stuff, that was useful to everyone from web developers to Internet marketers. Some great posts included:
Increasingly I find that posts to be of less relevance. due to his I’ve started to use the official Google Blog more and more as a source of info about what’s going on at the search engine and referring less and less to Matts site.
Does anyone still think that Matt Cutts blog has the same level of information as it used to?
After trying to get into the Microsoft webmaster tools, again, and clearing all my cookies and clearing my cache I was getting really frustrated with it. The I had a brain wave what if I use Internet Explorer to try and get in. No way that Microsoft would make a website that webmasters who didn’t use a crappy browser would not be able to access! Yeah right – first time in IE and all of a sudden I can add sites like Xmas came early. Un-fookin-believable. To get into Microsoft Webmaster Tools you need to use IE.
Am well annoyed by this. I hate IE – I can’t use i. I like all my little toolbars, I like changing to a black and red looking browser on occassion, and sometime I even like my browser to look like its Internet Explorer. But I do not like being forced to use Internet Explorer.
Am sure Bill @ Spiderwriting will love this! Let the Microsoft webmaster tool bashing commence. There are times when Googles dominance seems like a good thing – not often but just occasionally maybe that do not bad stuff really does exist!
Oh and as an aside every XML file they want you to put up has the same name – nice! So I’m now going to adapt one of my spiders to check competitors sites and start seeing what level of usage these Microsoft webmaster tools are getting – guess the usage figures could be low.
