Unusual search result w/o title, description or cached page

Google bug?

[nativenewyorker]

I was checking my SERP's on some keyword phrases and found a strange listing for my site. In the search results, the url of my page is listed as a blue link along with a gray link for Similar Pages. It does not display the title of the page, have any text showing what is on the page, the smaller green url, page size or the gray link for Cached. Anyone else ever see anything like this?

It appears like the example below.

www.webmasterworld.com/search-engines.html
Similar pagesTed

[jonrichd]

Is is possible that the page in question was not available when GoogleBot tried to spider it? I've seen this type of result occur occasionally, and when I try to follow the link, the page is not found.

Google 'thinks' the page is there because of incoming links, and is giving you the benefit of the doubt by listing it.

[yetanotheruser]

I saw this sort of behaviour a while ago.. (It always happens with .swf's which are held in a SRC=" but I guess GB doesn't bother reading)

I personally don't think it's a bug though.. GB is currently getting his/her(?) teeth into a new site of ours and I personally recon this is an indication of results in it's 'pages_yet_to_read' database..

ie. If GB reads /index.html one month.. and /index.html links to /widget/foo.html and /widget/bar.html then I think /wideget/foo and bar.html will appear in the results in this way. Next month of course GB will read foo and bar.html and their listings will get updated..

In short then... IMHO... listings like this are pages that Google knows exist but hasn't had a chance to read yet (or can't in the case of .swf's)

Anyone with me on this one! :)

ATB :)

[CuriousWeb]

Google 'thinks' the page is there because of incoming links, and is giving you the benefit of the doubt by listing it.

I agree with this. There was an established site in my industry that was taken down. It still has a heap of incoming links but is a 404 when you try to visit it. I think G keeps it in the index but shows no information as there is none there...

[nativenewyorker]

Thanks for all the replies.

jonrichd & curiousweb,
The page is definitely there with title displayed and text content on the page. My host is extremely reliable, so I doubt Googlebot came up with a page not found error.

yetanotheruser,
This is a simple page with mostly text and a handful of gif images. The scripts that are used on the page are the same on the other 200+ pages of my site.

Ted

[jdMorgan]

nny,

This also happens when Google finds a link to a page and has not indexed it or can not index it.

I fought a battle with the 'bot because it insisted on listing a page that I did not want listed in the SERPs. I had disallowed the page in robots.txt, but Googlebot found a link to it, so it showed up just as you describe - no title, no description, just a link.

I suspect your page hasn't yet been deep-crawled, or it was unavailable when Google tried to crawl it, or it was just dropped temporarily due to a transient GoogleGlitch.

Jim

[nativenewyorker]

jdmorgan,

disallowed the page in robots.txt

That was it. Apparently, I forgot to remove that page from my robots.txt file, so while there were links pointing to the page, Google couldn't index it.

Thanks,
Ted