Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Another strange anomoly in Google, that I discovered today.
I have a web page that ranks # 4 (page 1) for a long-tailed term that includes a well-known credit card. Nowhere on this page is this credit card name mentioned. However, about 1 year ago, I did mention this credit card brand by name on this page; but, for content-reasons, I removed it about 1 year ago.
The Google cache date for this page, is from about 2 weeks.
Why would this long-tail term still cause this web page to rank so high in the SERPs ? Is this just a Google hiccup ?
The Google cache date for this page, is from about 2 weeks.
When you click on the "cache" link, what does it say at the top about that keyword?
The message, which to be honest I've never taken note of before, seemed ambiguous before, but thanks for pointing to look for this, as it seems to make more sense now.
The keyword phrase <kw1> <kw2> <kw3> <kw4> is what gets me the results, and when I click on the "cache" link I get the following message displayed, below the cache date line:
"These search terms are highlighted: <kw1> <kw2> These terms only appear in links pointing to this page: <kw3> <kw4>"
As it turns out, only <kw1> and <kw2> are highlighted in text, and <kw3> and <kw4> are nowhere to be found - they are the reference to the Credit Card name that I alluded to above.
So, there must be some external links out there that still use <kw3> <kw4> are part of their anchor text when linking to this page. Although I'll take the "free" ranking, there seems to be a disconnect between the link and my page, on the part of Google. Or maybe if there are multiple links like this out there, Google places more weight on the reliability of these links' anchor text, than that of my content. I still find it a bit strange.
The issue is that Google's keyword highlighting function is not in sync with Google query rewriting. Whenever the highlighting function does not find the word on the page it always says that the keyword is in incoming links, whether that is true or not.
There are even examples where the query does not have to be rewritten for the cache highlighting function to fail - for instance if the word is found in the title or URL of the page, where it can't be highlighted. These cases all return the misleading message that the word was present in incoming links.
Well, if the message is misleading as you describe, then I go back to my original question - why am I ranking high for this long-tail term, if that term hasn't been in my content for over a year ? It further reduces my confidence in the Google concept.
therwise, it may be that you don't use the exact words, but others that Google believe are equally relevant to searchers and so it uses query expansion and returns your page.
Personally, I also believe that Google keeps historical copies of key pages, and can rank the page for words that no longer appear but were once present on the page. These are less common cases, though.
And as Andy has also mentioned, Google is rewriting queries a lot now, too - for spelling, stemming, semantic similarity and so on.
