What is this?

[tomapple]

I apologize in advance if this has been covered in another thread.

This morning I was doing a search on Google for a specific domain (as in domain.com, if anyone wants the specific domain I'll provide it). Received the results with the domain listing from the Google Directory for this domain. Then I click on "Find web pages that contain the term "domain.com"".

The results list pages from the domain itself of course, but I am also seeing pages from other domains. Where it is strange is that the text underneath these links appears to have been taken directly from the index page of the domain I searched for. But, the text shwon in the Google results is not resident on the other domains....it's as if these sites are cloaking the text from my site to Gogglebot.

[Marketing Guy]

Hi Tomapple and welcome to WebmasterWorld! :)

Is it just the description that shows your own content, or the actual pages too?

A simple solution (although you may have already checked this) is that webmasters have been linking to you, using your own text as a description (it's what i tend to do).

Scott

[tomapple]

Thanks.

No, these are not sites in anyway related to the site I was searching for. For example one appears to be some kind of click through portal to travel information.

<snip>

[edited by: ciml at 3:49 pm (utc) on Feb. 15, 2003]
[edit reason] No specifics please. [/edit]

[Yidaki]

Welcome Tomapple!

Possible reasons:

- the pages link to you through a redirect script
- the pages link to you through a page that does a meta refresh to your page

Google sometimes indexes such pages with the origin url but with the target content.

I don't think it's cloaking ...

[ciml]

Another common reason for text appearing in the snippet but not the page is just that the page changed.

In tomapple's specific case I think his suspicions may be justified though.