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, keyword
Two 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?
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[…] My theory is that there is some more Google title weirdness going on, possibly linked to anchor text, but definitely not a sign that google checkout has been hijacked. […]
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