Thanks to the generosity of Assaf from Paintyourlife.com, a fun, international site that lets you create custom paintings from photos, we've been given permission to share the perturbingly strange search results below:
The above screenshot shows Google in the #1 position for the search phrase "paintyourlife.com." Not only that, but the sitelinks are displaying, suggesting that Google (the search engine) thinks that "paintyourlife.com" is closely connected enough to be a branded search term referring to Google.com.
Google's not the only one suffering with odd results, though - Yahoo! has some odd ideas about paintyourlife.com as well:
At Yahoo!, searching for "paintyourlife" results in a title and description that comes from the site, but the domain and the referring link will send you to Google.com!
Obviously, we asked Assaf if PaintYourLife.com had recently been re-directed with a 301 or 302 or if some other event like a DNS switch could have caused these issues, but to the best of his knowledge, no such shift had occurred. I suspect that a technical problem of some kind affected the results we see above, but there's nothing like a search for your domain name resulting in Google coming up #1 to make you feel like the search giant's taking over everything lately.
Oh, and big props to Live & Ask for getting all of the queries around PaintYourLife.com showing their domain rather than Google's.
p.s. Here's a link to Archive.org's listings for the domain, none of which would suggest anything out of the ordinary.
BTW - Is it just me, or does the idea of having a painting of your house inside your house conjure up a Monty Burns meets MC Escher theme for anyone else? I think I want one...
Hi Rand - if you browse to the paintyourlife homepage with your user agent being Googlebot you're 302 redirected to google.com.
That's the root of the problem!
As to WHY this is in place - perhaps something related to cloaking? Maybe from a long time ago? Anyway - they should fix that and it should all start working again :-)
Great catch, Tom. I hadn't changed my user agent to GGbot (and of course the automated header checkers don't generally surf as GG either), but that makes perfect sense. Hopefully Assaf can get it fixed :)
PS - the wierd 302 redirect is actually in place for Googlebot, Yahoo Slurp and MSNbot (not sure about Ask - what's their bot called? Jeeves?!).
Anyway - the reason Live doesn't screw up the search results is becuase they just ignore 302 redirects! So when we say 'well done Live' what we really mean is, 'get with the program!'
PS - for anyone who wants to test this yourself you can change your user agent by using this handy firefox plugin coupled with this handy user agent list.
Tom - I had literally stepped off the flight from the US when I read this post on my Crackberry and it was almost too surreal for my head to handle. Thank you for investigating and restoring normality!
Given how much I imagine you were drinking in Vegas I suppose things like daylight and walking were almost too much for you to handle too right ;-)
Drinking? What are you suggesting?!
;)
I'm not suggesting anything - I have photomagraphical evidence via the wonder of facebook!
Dammit!
Nice pick up Tom. A good lesson - and not a bad site either.
My first thought was a cloaking/redirect issue.
My second thought was that this was Google's subtle way of telling Assaf that he was about to be acquired.
So, nothing for me to do here? :)
Let's generalize a bit: if both Google and Yahoo show a weirdism for your site, it's likely the issue is with your site, not with Google or Yahoo.
Likewise, using a tool such as Prefbar lets you easily change your user agent to check if a webserver is doing something different/strange for the "Googlebot" user agent. :)
Your smiling avatar is amusingly appropriate for a "This Really isn't My Fault" situation.
You must be extremely resilient to keep smiling through all of the recent flak. Good job.
Here's to it all smoothing out soon.
Hi smiling avatar is also a great impression of his never-ending calm when getting swamped by 'fans' at PubCon.
How did you describe them again Jane?!
;)
Ssshh!
I was very impressed with Matt's patience and demeanour while he was being swamped by about twenty adoring fans in the hallway at Pubcon. The end :)
i think this reinforces the science of SEO, where everything has an explanation. as long as we keep our objectivity and not resort to burning GG at the stake just because we don't understand something (example the recent PR changes), all will be well in the SE surfdom. I would never ask or want anyone to drive blind, only Al Pacino can get away with that. :p
Not to sound like an SEOmoz groupie, but Q+A and has been pretty damned useful to the rest of us, too.
Ever since that Dave Naylor interview it's turning into a fookin longshoreman's hall around here.
Hi everyone,
Thanks for your comments on the issue.
The whole thing started as we were trying to block visitors from China and some other countries, that were brutally copying our content. Then, those visitors started using anonymous proxies to do it, so we have redirected all visitors that have their IP address hidden to google.com (I was just now informed about it).
It seems that google bot hides
No problems - you'll find the moz community is very friendly :-)
Hopefully you can get it sorted out and then start getting some google love again!
Hunh. I have the opposite problem. In some cases (mostly having to do with local search) when someone searches for Google in Ann Arbor (where AdWords is now located) the first listing is for ME (because I'm a GAP) or my company. For the past year, we've been fielding phone calls, receiving resumes in email and the post, all meant for Google. Most people looking for Google don't realize it's AdWords, they just want Google. Heck, I got a call from the Detroit Police Dept looking for Google about some criminal investigation! Of course, there's no local listing for the local Google office, so it just goes on and on...
I came across this question last night before Rand had added a reply. I stared at it for a while and it wondered if Las Vegas was still messing with my head. Thanks to Tom for pointing out the problem!
I am actually excited how many interesting cases I come across at SEOMoz and YouMoz. Very informative. Thank you, Tom! Thumbs up!
They need to bump Google off with a Wikipedia listing. I call that fighting fire with fire.
All together, the whole thing should be a sort of combination of search-results and facts. Google kisses WikiPedia???
Hi guys,
Now that I have understood the root of the issue and fixed it, what can I do to make Google re-visit my website and re-index it correctly?
Thanks ,Assaf
Site Links can be bad branding for some sites
https://yentit.com/myspace.htm
That's pretty funny. Reputation management has always been a huge problem for Myspace, although I'd venture to say that they bring it upon themselves.
The thing that strikes me as incredible about Myspace is that if they were new and hadn't attracted a bazillion people, they'd never succeed. The ugliness, the error messages, the outages, the phishing, hacking and spamming, plus the ease with which people get away with these things would mean that no one would join.
Tom_C
Great work and thanks for the links to those great tools.
Geez... when I first read this I thought rand was outing someone for 302 pr hi-jacking.....
Hi Rand, I became interested in all of this SEO stuff you guys talk about, because I wanted to boost my website ranking in google. I ended up viewing an interview you had with Matt Cutts, and eventually came to your blog. I have experienced the 'pain' that many people feel when they become frustrated with the actions of google. There is a bottom line to all of this, however, in my opinion, which is that the reason google is king, is because when people want to find something quickly, they use google, and they usually do come up with what they are looking for, even if it does take several clicks, rather than just one or two.
I do agree that google often comes up with strange results, although the one you show above is new to me. I have seen how google puts sites that are basically useless to anyone, very high in the google rankings. People trying to boost their website's ranking may feel like frustrated slaves to google, but then again there is always paid television advertising. I just wish that it was true that cream always floats to the top.
That would completely freak me out.
It would bother me even more if I was a googler who truly believed that the user should find what they wanted easily with the right search terms.
I this case the person had the company name and, unless they clicked on the paid ad, wasn't going to easily find the right listing.
I'd be interested to hear if this was part of some BLR caused manual over-ride.
-OT