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 […]

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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:

Chinese spam in Google

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.


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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