Check this out, a search on jennifer convertibles in Google shows for Embassy of the Republic of Croatia to the USA sporting a Jennifer Convertibles stock quote feature. Yes, Google thinks that Convertibles & Croatia are the same thing, in a sense.

Both the main Jennifer Convertibles result and the Croatia site have a stock quote feature:

Why is this happening? The first thing I checked was if the two sites are hosted on the same server and share the same IP address. Guess what? They do. Both domain names resolve to the IP address of 65.254.228.100.

Why did I think to look at the IP information first? Well, I have been hearing fairly recent reports of Google confusing sites based on their IP information. When it comes to hosting on a shared server, the domain names typically resolve to the same IP address. Google can, on occasion, get confused when a domain name resolves to the same IP, especially if the server has issues. I know for a fact that the Jennifer Convertibles server had issues just a few days ago, which may have triggered this response from Google.

This example marks just one more reason to invest in a static IP address. Oh, but in this case, it may have worked in Jennifer Convertibles’ benefit. Just take a look at the third result. ;-)

Related Topics: Google: Web Search

About The Author: Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here. For more background information on Barry, see his full bio over here. See more articles by Barry Schwartz