8 ms·

The most mysterious Google ranking ever...

149 points by ry0ohki 16y ago

rouli 16y ago
another interesting thing to notice is that Google instant comes with the right result (cakecentral.com). Only when I press enter (or the search button) I get to the beerby.com result. Google instant does however claim that it's showing results for cake central magazine and I can search instead for "cake central". EDIT: even better - searching for cakecentral.com also leads to the same error page on beerby.com
eli 16y ago
I'm pretty sure the web crawl Google does to figure out your rankings is separate from the one that saves the cached version and probably that snippet. That said, I have no idea why that page would rank on those terms, error or not.
- RickRoll 16y ago
  Why would Google do this so inefficiently?
infinity 16y ago
Looking at the Google cache page I see this: These terms only appear in links pointing to this page: cake central Looks like the good old Google bombs still work :) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_bomb http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_bomb
- franze 16y ago
  definitely not a google bomb. just checked their incoming links, and well there are not links which target "cake central" the note "These terms only appear in links pointing to this page: cake central" always shows up as soon as the query words could not get found on the cached page.
  - infinity 16y ago
    Yes, there seems to be something else that is wrong with the Google index as some pages from the cakecentral.com domain show up with content from beerby - this has been noted by someone in this thread and I could just reproduce it. On the other hand, we can never be sure if pages exist or where they are on the web that link to our pages with a certain anchor text. The link: operator is broken since a long time and shows only a small subset of the pages linking to the page in question if anything at all. A more complete list of links can be found in the Google Webmaster Tools, but this is also never 100% complete or up to date. And we can use the Site Explorer to get on the quest to find a certain link: http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/ http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/
    - franze 16y ago
      siteexplorer is more than useless, and the google link: operator is crippled, but for a link bomb you need quite some links with the exact matching linktext, but a simple search for ["cake central" beerby] does not show anything. (and other queries with the link: inanchor: oprators, too) so that it can be relativly safely assumed that it is not a link bomb (in a link bomb you always find some of the links) or lets phrase it like this there is absence of evidence that it was a link bomb
franze 16y ago
ok, could it be that they both have the same server hosting company? because here we see a beerby page with a cakecentral URL http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Acakecentral.com+beerby&hl=all&pws=0 http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Acakecentral.com+beerby... i would guess it was either a server (housing) accident or a DNS f*ckup that let beerby and cakecentral switch places (in an erroneous state) for a short time, bad thing google picked u the cakecentral home page URL in that moment. it saw it as either a redirect or a direct douplicate of the beerby site and decided to show the older indexed page with the same content (the beerby error page). yeah, either this or google screwed up. update: why i guess this is because i have seen similar errors when sombody screws up redirects from the home page. (makes HTTP 302 redirects from the home page to another page, and that page (or the redirect) is then changed to something else...) but this is the first time i ever see such an error between two unrelated sites.
- ry0ohki 16y ago
  lol the last result on that one even has the cakecentral domain, but has a title of one of our user pages. edit I'm wondering if maybe something F'ed up in Google's database
- infinity 16y ago
  I could reproduce this weird behaviour. First I thought that there might be some pages linking to the error page with the anchor text in question - this is also what the cache page claims. Also there are many scraper and auto generated spam sites with broken links that never really show up in the Google index. Similar cases have happened before. There is a forum by Google for Webmasters where you can tell Google about problems with your website: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters?hl=en http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters?hl=en You could tell them your findings and maybe someone from the Google team will look into the matter, if you are lucky.
chmike 16y ago
Google bombing ? ;) In popular french "cake traces" refers to brown marks in underpants. I guess the french expression "cake face" is a subsequent derivation from it. So I'm trying to guess what "cake central" might mean ...
funkdobiest 16y ago
Could this be some new slang term that is not quite popular yet? "Cake central" = drinking lots of beer. "The other day I got caked at that bar, it was cake central down there"
- tony584 16y ago
  its not on urban dictionary ... yet...
acangiano 16y ago
It is definitely an anomaly. Take a look at the following comparison between the top 10 results for the keyword "cake central". It's worse than the other results in every significant way, yet it sits at #1. http://grab.by/grabs/32ac4e9cade57bedcc96c8e42fb66a2f.png http://grab.by/grabs/32ac4e9cade57bedcc96c8e42fb66a2f.png DA = Domain Age PR = Page Rank IC = Indexed Content (pages) BLP= Backlinks for the page BLD = Backlinks for the domain BLEG = Backlinks from .edu/.gov pages DMZ = Listed in DMOZ YAH = Listed in Yahoo Directory Title, URL, Desc, Head = Whether the keyword is included in any of those CA = Google Cache age
- limmeau 16y ago
  Where does one go to get such a table?
  - acangiano 16y ago
    Market Samurai: http://www.marketsamurai.com/c/Antonio http://www.marketsamurai.com/c/Antonio (referral link). It's an excellent (and expensive) program for internet marketing and SEO research, available for Mac and Windows (it's made in Flex/Air). If you buy during the trial period, you can get a big discount though. I got my copy for $97. Screenshot of the screen from which the table has been taken: http://grab.by/grabs/323101a2a3382f4c75b2f077a481931c.png http://grab.by/grabs/323101a2a3382f4c75b2f077a481931c.png
    - ddemchuk 16y ago
      shameless affiliate link drop man, come on now
  - petewailes 16y ago
    I'd personally recommend getting the data by installing SEO Site Tools for Chrome, and/or the SEOmoz Mozbar. Both free. Disclaimer: I know the guys from SEOmoz fairly well, and have used their site for years.
  - wmeredith 16y ago
    Try http://360voltage.com http://360voltage.com and run a Voltmeter report. You have to have an account, but it's free. There's a ton of services like this, SEOmoz is probably the best.
zdxfhgjyt 16y ago
●------ http://u.ly/73I http://u.ly/73I ------● ●------ http://u.ly/73I http://u.ly/73I ------● ●------ http://u.ly/73I http://u.ly/73I ------● ●------ http://u.ly/73I http://u.ly/73I ------● ●------ http://u.ly/73I http://u.ly/73I ------● ●------ http://u.ly/73I http://u.ly/73I ------● ●------ http://u.ly/73I http://u.ly/73I ------● ●------ http://u.ly/73I http://u.ly/73I ------● ●------ http://u.ly/73I http://u.ly/73I ------● ●------ http://u.ly/73I http://u.ly/73I ------● ●------ http://u.ly/73I http://u.ly/73I ------● ●------ http://u.ly/73I http://u.ly/73I ------● ●------ http://u.ly/73I http://u.ly/73I ------● ●------ http://u.ly/73I http://u.ly/73I ------● ●------ http://u.ly/73I http://u.ly/73I ------● ●------ http://u.ly/73I http://u.ly/73I ------●
bherms 16y ago
Using CakePHP framework? That wouldn't affect it, but that's the first thing that popped into my mind.
- ry0ohki 16y ago
  Good thought, but we're not using CakePHP
pieter 16y ago
Interesting that people, when searching for 'cake central', still click on a link with a title saying 'ERROR: backend server did not respond in time' even though the second result has 'CakeCentral' in bold.
- scotty79 16y ago
  Maybe they are Feeling Lucky ?
  - infinity 16y ago
    So many lucky users? :) In an interview with the Washington Post in 2006 Marissa Mayer from Google said that almost no one ever uses the "I'm feeling lucky" button: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/02/AR2006100201277_pf.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10... But maybe in 2011 Google users are luckier.
  - theycallmemorty 16y ago
    Or just typing 'cake central' in an address bar in firefox.
- iaskwhy 16y ago
  That's why Adwords works wonders if you can get your ad on the top of a SERP.
- patrickas 16y ago
  I guess most are probably just clicking on "I'm feeling lucky" and going there without even seeing the results.
Sadranyc 16y ago
There was a similar ranking some months ago involving searching for "vatican" in Google http://news.ninemsn.com.au/technology/7931120/vatican-search-hits-wrong-website http://news.ninemsn.com.au/technology/7931120/vatican-search...
cpr 16y ago
Doesn't this just reflect the dirty little secret that Google doesn't really have to get any particular details right, just mostly right most of the time?
trustfundbaby 16y ago
Real Head scratcher. Waiting for Matt Cutts to hop on here and explain this.
andrenotgiant 16y ago
It's a super rare HTTP Response Code issue: STEP 1: Accessing CakeCentral.com returns a 404 "Not Found" HTTP Code when requested: 1. Go to http://www.rexswain.com/httpview.html http://www.rexswain.com/httpview.html and enter in http://cakecentral.com/ http://cakecentral.com/ 2. Take a look at the response codes, see the 404 STEP 2: Previously, inexplicably, _actual_ error pages on CakeCentral.com such as: http://www.google.com/search?q=site:www.cakecentral.com%2Fcake-decorating-photos.html http://www.google.com/search?q=site:www.cakecentral.com%2Fca... returned 302 redirects to Beerby.com STEP 3: Beerby.com uses a "Soft" error page, meaning if you type in a URL like: http://www.beerby.com/adfadi http://www.beerby.com/adfadi you get a 302 TEMPORARY redirect to a 200 OK page.
- ry0ohki 16y ago
  I think you're on the right trail, but it's still confusing why this would take the number one ranking over the root domain? Maybe Google thought the entire domain had moved?
  - andrenotgiant 16y ago
    Yeah i bet they think that is the temporary location of the cakecentral homepage
  - theycallmemorty 16y ago
    Maybe there are a lot of links to pages on cakecentral.com that no longer exist and now result in 404?
- ZoFreX 16y ago
  STEP 4: Google now shows the destination page if your results contain a 302 redirect, not the source page: > Many months ago, if you saw someresult.com/search2.php?url=mydomain.com, that would sometimes have content from mydomain. That could happen when the someresult.com url was a 302 redirect to mydomain.com and we decided to show a result from someresult.com. Since then, we’ve changed our heuristics to make showing the source url for 302 redirects much more rare. We are moving to a framework for handling redirects in which we will almost always show the destination url. http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-advice-url-canonicalization/ http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-advice-url-canonicalizatio...
webuiarchitect 16y ago
That's really an interesting find.
chanux 16y ago
I tried whoishostingthis.com on both beerby.com and cakecentral.com to get reported of 404 error. Edit: It worked at the second attempt beerby.com is hosted at Acquia hosting and cakecentral.com at Amazon
- ry0ohki 16y ago
  hmm? Beerby is on Amazon too actually
  - chanux 16y ago
    http://www.whoishostingthis.com/beerby.com http://www.whoishostingthis.com/beerby.com
    - ry0ohki 16y ago
      That's all well and good, but I'm one of the owners of Beerby and I can tell you for sure it's on Amazon EC2 :)
EGreg 16y ago
This likely happens when a page was the top result but then got re-spidered. Google probably keeps the old rank for a while, even though the content has changed.
speleding 16y ago
This is the reason you should always configure your web server to serve an HTTP 503 "Unavailable" when your backend is not online or not fast enough. This will tell the Google bot to come back later and not index the result.
wowfat 16y ago
looks like it is fixed now

149 points by ry0ohki 16y ago

rouli 16y ago

another interesting thing to notice is that Google instant comes with the right result (cakecentral.com). Only when I press enter (or the search button) I get to the beerby.com result. Google instant does however claim that it's showing results for cake central magazine and I can search instead for "cake central". EDIT: even better - searching for cakecentral.com also leads to the same error page on beerby.com

eli 16y ago

I'm pretty sure the web crawl Google does to figure out your rankings is separate from the one that saves the cached version and probably that snippet. That said, I have no idea why that page would rank on those terms, error or not.

RickRoll 16y ago
Why would Google do this so inefficiently?

infinity 16y ago

Looking at the Google cache page I see this: These terms only appear in links pointing to this page: cake central Looks like the good old Google bombs still work :) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_bomb http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_bomb

franze 16y ago
definitely not a google bomb. just checked their incoming links, and well there are not links which target "cake central" the note "These terms only appear in links pointing to this page: cake central" always shows up as soon as the query words could not get found on the cached page.
- infinity 16y ago
  Yes, there seems to be something else that is wrong with the Google index as some pages from the cakecentral.com domain show up with content from beerby - this has been noted by someone in this thread and I could just reproduce it. On the other hand, we can never be sure if pages exist or where they are on the web that link to our pages with a certain anchor text. The link: operator is broken since a long time and shows only a small subset of the pages linking to the page in question if anything at all. A more complete list of links can be found in the Google Webmaster Tools, but this is also never 100% complete or up to date. And we can use the Site Explorer to get on the quest to find a certain link: http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/ http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/
  - franze 16y ago
    siteexplorer is more than useless, and the google link: operator is crippled, but for a link bomb you need quite some links with the exact matching linktext, but a simple search for ["cake central" beerby] does not show anything. (and other queries with the link: inanchor: oprators, too) so that it can be relativly safely assumed that it is not a link bomb (in a link bomb you always find some of the links) or lets phrase it like this there is absence of evidence that it was a link bomb

franze 16y ago

ok, could it be that they both have the same server hosting company? because here we see a beerby page with a cakecentral URL http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Acakecentral.com+beerby&hl=all&pws=0 http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Acakecentral.com+beerby... i would guess it was either a server (housing) accident or a DNS f*ckup that let beerby and cakecentral switch places (in an erroneous state) for a short time, bad thing google picked u the cakecentral home page URL in that moment. it saw it as either a redirect or a direct douplicate of the beerby site and decided to show the older indexed page with the same content (the beerby error page). yeah, either this or google screwed up. update: why i guess this is because i have seen similar errors when sombody screws up redirects from the home page. (makes HTTP 302 redirects from the home page to another page, and that page (or the redirect) is then changed to something else...) but this is the first time i ever see such an error between two unrelated sites.

ry0ohki 16y ago
lol the last result on that one even has the cakecentral domain, but has a title of one of our user pages. edit I'm wondering if maybe something F'ed up in Google's database
infinity 16y ago
I could reproduce this weird behaviour. First I thought that there might be some pages linking to the error page with the anchor text in question - this is also what the cache page claims. Also there are many scraper and auto generated spam sites with broken links that never really show up in the Google index. Similar cases have happened before. There is a forum by Google for Webmasters where you can tell Google about problems with your website: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters?hl=en http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters?hl=en You could tell them your findings and maybe someone from the Google team will look into the matter, if you are lucky.

chmike 16y ago

Google bombing ? ;) In popular french "cake traces" refers to brown marks in underpants. I guess the french expression "cake face" is a subsequent derivation from it. So I'm trying to guess what "cake central" might mean ...

funkdobiest 16y ago

Could this be some new slang term that is not quite popular yet? "Cake central" = drinking lots of beer. "The other day I got caked at that bar, it was cake central down there"

tony584 16y ago
its not on urban dictionary ... yet...

acangiano 16y ago

It is definitely an anomaly. Take a look at the following comparison between the top 10 results for the keyword "cake central". It's worse than the other results in every significant way, yet it sits at #1. http://grab.by/grabs/32ac4e9cade57bedcc96c8e42fb66a2f.png http://grab.by/grabs/32ac4e9cade57bedcc96c8e42fb66a2f.png DA = Domain Age PR = Page Rank IC = Indexed Content (pages) BLP= Backlinks for the page BLD = Backlinks for the domain BLEG = Backlinks from .edu/.gov pages DMZ = Listed in DMOZ YAH = Listed in Yahoo Directory Title, URL, Desc, Head = Whether the keyword is included in any of those CA = Google Cache age

limmeau 16y ago
Where does one go to get such a table?
- acangiano 16y ago
  Market Samurai: http://www.marketsamurai.com/c/Antonio http://www.marketsamurai.com/c/Antonio (referral link). It's an excellent (and expensive) program for internet marketing and SEO research, available for Mac and Windows (it's made in Flex/Air). If you buy during the trial period, you can get a big discount though. I got my copy for $97. Screenshot of the screen from which the table has been taken: http://grab.by/grabs/323101a2a3382f4c75b2f077a481931c.png http://grab.by/grabs/323101a2a3382f4c75b2f077a481931c.png
  - ddemchuk 16y ago
    shameless affiliate link drop man, come on now
- petewailes 16y ago
  I'd personally recommend getting the data by installing SEO Site Tools for Chrome, and/or the SEOmoz Mozbar. Both free. Disclaimer: I know the guys from SEOmoz fairly well, and have used their site for years.
- wmeredith 16y ago
  Try http://360voltage.com http://360voltage.com and run a Voltmeter report. You have to have an account, but it's free. There's a ton of services like this, SEOmoz is probably the best.

zdxfhgjyt 16y ago

●------ http://u.ly/73I http://u.ly/73I ------● ●------ http://u.ly/73I http://u.ly/73I ------● ●------ http://u.ly/73I http://u.ly/73I ------● ●------ http://u.ly/73I http://u.ly/73I ------● ●------ http://u.ly/73I http://u.ly/73I ------● ●------ http://u.ly/73I http://u.ly/73I ------● ●------ http://u.ly/73I http://u.ly/73I ------● ●------ http://u.ly/73I http://u.ly/73I ------● ●------ http://u.ly/73I http://u.ly/73I ------● ●------ http://u.ly/73I http://u.ly/73I ------● ●------ http://u.ly/73I http://u.ly/73I ------● ●------ http://u.ly/73I http://u.ly/73I ------● ●------ http://u.ly/73I http://u.ly/73I ------● ●------ http://u.ly/73I http://u.ly/73I ------● ●------ http://u.ly/73I http://u.ly/73I ------● ●------ http://u.ly/73I http://u.ly/73I ------●

bherms 16y ago

Using CakePHP framework? That wouldn't affect it, but that's the first thing that popped into my mind.

ry0ohki 16y ago
Good thought, but we're not using CakePHP

pieter 16y ago

Interesting that people, when searching for 'cake central', still click on a link with a title saying 'ERROR: backend server did not respond in time' even though the second result has 'CakeCentral' in bold.

scotty79 16y ago
Maybe they are Feeling Lucky ?
- infinity 16y ago
  So many lucky users? :) In an interview with the Washington Post in 2006 Marissa Mayer from Google said that almost no one ever uses the "I'm feeling lucky" button: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/02/AR2006100201277_pf.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10... But maybe in 2011 Google users are luckier.
- theycallmemorty 16y ago
  Or just typing 'cake central' in an address bar in firefox.
iaskwhy 16y ago
That's why Adwords works wonders if you can get your ad on the top of a SERP.
patrickas 16y ago
I guess most are probably just clicking on "I'm feeling lucky" and going there without even seeing the results.

Sadranyc 16y ago

There was a similar ranking some months ago involving searching for "vatican" in Google http://news.ninemsn.com.au/technology/7931120/vatican-search-hits-wrong-website http://news.ninemsn.com.au/technology/7931120/vatican-search...

cpr 16y ago

Doesn't this just reflect the dirty little secret that Google doesn't really have to get any particular details right, just mostly right most of the time?

trustfundbaby 16y ago

Real Head scratcher. Waiting for Matt Cutts to hop on here and explain this.

andrenotgiant 16y ago

It's a super rare HTTP Response Code issue: STEP 1: Accessing CakeCentral.com returns a 404 "Not Found" HTTP Code when requested: 1. Go to http://www.rexswain.com/httpview.html http://www.rexswain.com/httpview.html and enter in http://cakecentral.com/ http://cakecentral.com/ 2. Take a look at the response codes, see the 404 STEP 2: Previously, inexplicably, _actual_ error pages on CakeCentral.com such as: http://www.google.com/search?q=site:www.cakecentral.com%2Fcake-decorating-photos.html http://www.google.com/search?q=site:www.cakecentral.com%2Fca... returned 302 redirects to Beerby.com STEP 3: Beerby.com uses a "Soft" error page, meaning if you type in a URL like: http://www.beerby.com/adfadi http://www.beerby.com/adfadi you get a 302 TEMPORARY redirect to a 200 OK page.

ry0ohki 16y ago
I think you're on the right trail, but it's still confusing why this would take the number one ranking over the root domain? Maybe Google thought the entire domain had moved?
- andrenotgiant 16y ago
  Yeah i bet they think that is the temporary location of the cakecentral homepage
- theycallmemorty 16y ago
  Maybe there are a lot of links to pages on cakecentral.com that no longer exist and now result in 404?
ZoFreX 16y ago
STEP 4: Google now shows the destination page if your results contain a 302 redirect, not the source page: > Many months ago, if you saw someresult.com/search2.php?url=mydomain.com, that would sometimes have content from mydomain. That could happen when the someresult.com url was a 302 redirect to mydomain.com and we decided to show a result from someresult.com. Since then, we’ve changed our heuristics to make showing the source url for 302 redirects much more rare. We are moving to a framework for handling redirects in which we will almost always show the destination url. http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-advice-url-canonicalization/ http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-advice-url-canonicalizatio...

webuiarchitect 16y ago

That's really an interesting find.

chanux 16y ago

I tried whoishostingthis.com on both beerby.com and cakecentral.com to get reported of 404 error. Edit: It worked at the second attempt beerby.com is hosted at Acquia hosting and cakecentral.com at Amazon

ry0ohki 16y ago
hmm? Beerby is on Amazon too actually
- chanux 16y ago
  http://www.whoishostingthis.com/beerby.com http://www.whoishostingthis.com/beerby.com
  - ry0ohki 16y ago
    That's all well and good, but I'm one of the owners of Beerby and I can tell you for sure it's on Amazon EC2 :)

EGreg 16y ago

This likely happens when a page was the top result but then got re-spidered. Google probably keeps the old rank for a while, even though the content has changed.

speleding 16y ago

This is the reason you should always configure your web server to serve an HTTP 503 "Unavailable" when your backend is not online or not fast enough. This will tell the Google bot to come back later and not index the result.

wowfat 16y ago

looks like it is fixed now