Google Weirdness
The other day I was doing some research on Google and something looked weird. Typically Google shows the title tag for a site followed by a description (either pulled from the meta description or the page itself if no meta description exists).What looked weird was I saw a title tag that looked something like this:8 random keyword, keyword, keywordTwo things jumped out - first of all, I would never use an 8 to start a title tag. Second, all of the words were lower-case (in general I capitalize page titles because I think it looks better). I also noticed that it was a secure page (the URL started with https://) - this seemed weird because usually Google just shows the URL for secure pages.My theory was that this title was actually the anchor text for a page linking to the site I was looking at - I did some research and found out I was right. There was only one page that had that text on it and it was linking to this secure page - so Google was actually determining the title from external content (ie, the anchor text). Think about the implications - in theory, you could find a secure page on a competitor’s site and SEO that page for a phrase like “X company - we really suck.” Note that I was only seeing this behavior on a few datacenters - 64.233.167.99, 64.233.167.104 and 64.233.167.147.I figured that this was a passing oversight on Google’s part, but just in case they didn’t catch it right away I decided to do something fun with it. I linked to a secure page with strategic anchor text so when somebody typed in “mozy” (without the quotes) they would see a title that says “google loves mozy backup” - an endorsement from a pretty credible source for a pretty awesome remote backup solution :)Well, it looks like Google took my bait and it’s now working - you should be able to see an example here (unless they’ve plugged the hole which should happen pretty quickly). You can see a screenshot here of the Google weirdness if you’re too late to the party.Keep in mind that while what I did was pretty benign (neither party should be upset with my little game), some people could potentially do some bad stuff with it - off-site factors should not be able to influence what users see when they search for your site.Hey Matt Cutts, care to comment?
Google Update
I haven’t been so good at writing lately but I have made a “New Month’s Resolution” to be better about writing on my blog - sorry, the blogosphere moves to fast to wait around for New Year’s.Seriously, though, I’m seeing a lot of dancing across datacenters for a few sites that I keep a close eye on. I have seen some pretty dramatic increases but I’m trying not to get my hopes up too much - I have seen a few google updates that rolled out with extremely high numbers only to update me in a later phase of the update. Keep that in mind.BTW, you can check your pagerank across multiple datacenters at SEO Chat.
Can Shopping.com really not figure this out?
It’s been a while since I wrote a post about comparison engines but I can’t believe the issue that we’ve had with Shopping.com recently. In our industry (computer hardware and accessories) it is not very uncommon for two different products to have the same MPN (manufacturer part number). For instance, two manufacturer’s may use the part number 200A for two products that are entirely different.Normally this wouldn’t cause any problems - you’re not likely to accidentally buy a garden hose instead of a computer cable because the two manufacturers have the same part number. Even if both products were similar you would most likely check the manufacturer/brand first, right?Apparently Shopping.com, however, has no way to handle this. We provide a feed of all of our products periodically to SDC which includes our product description, part number, manufacturer, etc. As far as I can tell, however, their engine only considers the part numbers we provide and the price. For example, we have a Norco 4U Steel Rackmount Chassis with the part number DS-600s. Unfortunately this also happens to be a part number for a Compaq laptop, so when people searching for this part number on Shopping.com see that we have the laptop for $260 they obviously want to find out if the deal is legit (see the search in action here).Keep in mind that we have never sold this laptop or fed this product description to Shopping.com - they just noticed in our feed that we were using that part number and have been driving us unqualified (no conversion) traffic ever since. Our traffic coordinator (aka The ATC) has been working with them to fix the problem - I’ll let you know what they suggest we do in these situations.As a side-note, if you’re interested in learning more about comparison shopping engines I strongly recommend you check out Brian’s blog at ComparisonEngines.com. Brian, if you read this have you seen this issue before and do you have any suggestions for us?