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Sep. 19, 2007 at 10:08am Eastern by Barry Schwartz
Weird Results At Google Being Reported
AltaVista is now in the top search results for a Google search on SEO? And what's with all these Chinese pages suddenly showing up. Folks are noting that Google's results have suddenly seemed to have gotten funky.
Aaron Wall notes that a search at Google for SEO returns the search engine AltaVista in position number seven. Danny and I have confirmed this to be currently true. What does AltaVista have to do with SEO or Search Engine Optimization?
Aaron also reported seeing the blog of Matt Cutts in the number four spot for a Google search on blog. I currently don't see Matt in the fourth position, but I trust Aaron on that.
Also, I reported this morning at the Search Engine Roundtable about weird Chinese looking domains coming into the search index. Many webmasters have been complaining that the long tail queries are showing these fake .cn domains in the search results. If you click on those results, a virus can be installed on your computer, so be careful! Here is a screen capture of those results:
Exactly what is going on is not known. Matt Cutts said in a response to the Chinese spam thing:
There’s at least one infrastructure change we wanted to make in order to handle these better. Infrastructure changes take more time than just killing specific spam sites.
So something is definitely up.
Have examples of your own, feel free to comment with them.
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By Barry Schwartz
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Reader Comments
I saw an extreme example of this last night for a single-word search query. Now I'm seeing it across a wider spread of various terms.
I don't see the Asian thing so much, but just some bizarre results for searches in general including a parked domain, an obscure blog, a small regional site and several non-US sites in the top ten for a generic single word search.
But now I'm seeing similar bad SERPs for a variety of searches.
Hopefully I'm just occasionally hitting a server they are testing something on and/or these are otherwise temporary tests.
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September 19, 2007 2:12 PMIt really has been a couple years sonce Google actually provided good search results. they have been very busy with other projects since then.
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September 19, 2007 7:55 PMOne thing I've speculated, Google seems to be tweaking how it deals with sites which have a huge number of inlinks, and how much weight to give that specific factor.
Hey Barry, these are two unrelated things, but the right teams are aware of both of them and have changes pending. The change for one-word queries is already live at some places and should be live at 100% of the datacenters in the next 2-3 days, for example.
Even there are bugs in the analytics. My hit counts are less than yesterday. And I can't switch sites with the drop down list.
Google College is on a vacation, I guess.
I think the Chinese hacker/spammers are manipulating some of the search results for commercial purposes. It is what I would consider” search result spam hacking”.
I think AltaVista search result site has been down for a few days, the abnormally high search results for AltaVista may be from people trying to find AltaVista search and from people trying to find out news about why they can't reach AltaVista. AltaVista seems to have been down or blocked the past two days, at least from where I am at. Apparently it has happened to many other users.
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September 20, 2007 12:46 PM
Not exactly related to this, but I've been finding quite frequently that when using Blogger I will suddenly find myself in the German or French version of the site (all buttons etc.. in that language).