Text strings that I know should be there... aren't

[oddsod]

I first encountered this while trying to find people stealing my content. In addition to tools like copyscape I sometimes just choose an unusual string of text from one of my pages and search for it. For example, on this post I could use this: Google [google.com]

At first I panicked when even my own pages weren't coming up for select sets of words. It suggested a ban. But after a little research I find that this is happening even to pages of mine that are still indexed and doing well in Google.

Is this a behaviour anyone else has noticed? Any theories on why?

[tedster]

I have looked off and on for similar examples, oddsod -- can't find any so far. Do the pages that hold these phrases show up as cached?

[iridiax]

I once had a similar odd problem with text gremlins. Although the problem pages were in Google's index, it couldn't find some of the selected text strings on them. When I looked at my source code, I found box-shaped font symbols and   between words, which had somehow just appeared after I originally copied and pasted the text into my page.

[centime]

I have seen this, but as Tedster hints, only with urls that are indexed, but not cached

no cache, no text to find

[tedster]

box-shaped font symbols and   between words

Good catch -- yes, checking you source code for the exact phrase character string (not just a browser's rendering) would be the right thing to do.

[theBear]

Just a hunch.

Long tail like searches sometimes don't return results because the index does not _YET_ contain information at that level of detail.

I've seen this from time to time.

[oddsod]

>> Do the pages that hold these phrases show up as cached?
AFAIK, all pages on that site have cached turned off.

>> I found box-shaped font symbols
The code is near perfect, validated, and I've just double checked it.

>> the index does not _YET_ contain information at that level of detail
Possibly. I can't seem to reproduce the errors now. For any of my pages.

[centime]

Are you saying that you instruct the search engines not to cache those pages at all?

In that case, I don't believe they can search the text on your site without a cache on their servers

Then again,,