Google Bug Turned Entire Web Into “Lorem Ipsum”

Lorem Ipsum is boilerplate text commonly used by the design community to illustrate how the text on a website or print design will look within the visual graphical creatives. It turned out that the boilerplate text of Lorem Ipsum was used on every webpage, according to Google. On Friday, Gabriela Vatu picked up on the […]

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Lorem Ipsum is boilerplate text commonly used by the design community to illustrate how the text on a website or print design will look within the visual graphical creatives. It turned out that the boilerplate text of Lorem Ipsum was used on every webpage, according to Google.

On Friday, Gabriela Vatu picked up on the weird issue with Google showing Lorem Ipsum content in the search results snippets when you search for the term [Consectetur] plus any site name.

We were able to replicate the issue and asked Google what was up. Google told us this was “an internal indexing issue,” and they fixed the behavior on Saturday. A Google spokesperson told us, “this behavior was due to an internal indexing issue, but we’ve removed this behavior going forward.”

Here is a screen shot of the issue from Friday:

google-lorem-ipsum-bug

This is obviously a very odd and unusual bug to see in Google.


About the author

Barry Schwartz
Staff
Barry Schwartz is a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry can be followed on Twitter here.

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