SERP for a highly competitive keyword shows a holding page

[TheHorse2010]

Hi

I work for a web company and we've just experienced something very strange in Google's SERPs. When performing a search for the key phrases 'adidas football kits' - you will notice at the bottom of the first page a search result for a website called michaelmas house (one of new customers). Do another search for 'nike football kits' and you'll see similar SERPs.

This is very strange as these are completely unrelated searches to the michaelmas house business (they do giftware) and also the home page literally has a placeholder image on it - no related meta data or anything. So how can this be shown in high traffic searches when it's totally unrelated? To make it more confusing (and the reason we found out) is that we have a football kit website in our portfolio who have lost ranking on their own domain.

We are totally stumped so hoping you guys might have the slightest idea....

[tedster]

Hello TheHorse2010 - welcome to the forums.

As a rule (see our Terms of Service [webmasterworld.com]) we don't mention specific websites or keywords in posts because there's a lot of potential for abuse - and the posts here sometimes end up outranking the real websites being discussed.

However you've found a very strange anomaly and we will make an exception. For those who want to diagnose the situation, note that this SERP is on google.co.uk - NOT google.com

[Spencer]

site:michaelmashouse.com shows "HACKED BY TUKANG TIDUR AKA REAL TUKANG TIDUR" ... ?

[aakk9999]

site:michaelmashouse.com shows "HACKED BY TUKANG TIDUR AKA REAL TUKANG TIDUR" ... ?

The michaelmashouse site referred to by OP is michaelmashouse.co.uk, not .com

[Robert Charlton]

When I search google.co.uk just for the word "michaelmas", I'm noticing that in the #9 spot is a single word page title, Michaelmas, the title of the Michaelmas page on the Eton College site...
http://www.etoncollege.com/Michaelmas.aspx

The page has the following opening paragraph, and is largely about football....

The major sports in the Michaelmas are Association and Rugby Football: your house master will ask you to choose one or the other....

I'm thinking this may be an unexpected co-occurence effect of the word "michaelmas" in Google's phrase-based indexing, perhaps a bug.

Late last night I started reading Google patent called...

Index server architecture using tiered and sharded phrase posting lists
[patft.uspto.gov...]

The patent was suggested by Bill Slawski in one of his, as usual, superb articles...

Phrasification and Revisiting Google's Phrase Based Indexing
http://www.seobythesea.com/?p=3689 [seobythesea.com]

He talks mostly about phrasification, and doesn't say much about the particular tiered indexing list implementation discussed in the patent. If I'm reading things correctly, and if the patent has been implemented, the Eton college Michaelmas page and Michaelmas House are very likely to be sharing what's called a "phrase posting list".

A lot of odd things I've been seeing in the past few weeks would be explained by either too much effect from these lists, or else some kind of a bug in their implementation. Google may well have other forms of handling co-occurrence as well, but the idea of these separate posting lists is a productive one with regard to what I've been seeing. More coming on various other related topics.

[Robert Charlton]

PS - Brief comments on co-occurrence in these two discussions. I'm now thinking it's co-occurrence dialed up way too high, or else a bug... possibly with some tables out of sync as well....

Mayday-style long-tail update happening again?
http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4193036.htm [webmasterworld.com]

...and in...

Link Juice Theories
http://www.webmasterworld.com/link_development/4185705.htm [webmasterworld.com]

[Spencer]

aakk9999 - "The michaelmashouse site referred to by OP is michaelmashouse.co.uk, not .com"

Sorry, I didn't know the answer had to be 2 dimensional. The .com dns has the same owner as the .co.uk. I assume they are hosted on the same server and that they had both been hacked in the past.

Personally, I'm looking at TUKANG TIDUR's networks to see how they have managed to manipulate Google's top keyphrases.

[TheHorse]

Thanks for the posts. The only significant part that puzzles us thats not been picked up on is that the Michaelmas site (which was hacked just before we signed them up) has 'seemingly' replaced kicked another of our customers ranking for this key phrase and replaced it. Could this be done by hackers?

Going further on the hacker line - we have also had two new customers sites' hacked (again prior to us actually carrying out any work or bringing the domain name over). Coincidence or something more sinister as we've never had this in over ten years of building sites.

[Robert Charlton]

...the Michaelmas site (which was hacked just before we signed them up) has 'seemingly' replaced kicked another of our customers ranking for this key phrase and replaced it...

The above is much more specific than your original post, and I'd have to say that it is too precise a match to be coincidental.

Since the Michaelmas placeholder currently has no text content, its rankings must come from inbound links pointing to www.michaelmas.co.uk.

Conceivably, your football site's domain name server got hacked and links that were pointing to your football site have been redirected to michaelmas, but I assume you'd see that redirection in a browser if you entered your football site's domain name. Check the football site's domain on a server header checker, and make sure it's not being redirected to michaelmas.

I should add, with regard to my theory, that if it were some kind of odd co-occurrence effect, that the present setup of no distracting text on the Michaelmas place-holder page might be an ideal "blank canvas" on which to see the effect I'm supposing... ie, with michaelmas being the common word in the phrase posting list that also includes a bunch of football terms.

I'm tending to think now it's more likely a "crossed wire" somewhere in the hosting or dns than in Google's phrase posting list... though conceivably there's a combination of both going on, skewed by the word "michaelmas" that might have effectively become a kind of football "brand". This is very similar to one of the strange results I've seen recently, so similar I was assuming yours was another.

It's late at night here, so I need to leave it at that for now. I'd check into what's going on with your other domain's dns.

Meta tags on a page, incidentally, really don't have any effect on rankings. The page "title element", in the head section but not technically a meta tag, can be very influential in page rankings, particularly in conjunction with inbound linking and onpage text.

Why, btw, have you gone to a place-holder page about your hosting company rather than a temporary page identifying Michaelmas House with some temporary content related to them? WhoIs does show that they'd had a site up before. I'd hold off making any change for now, until you diagnose this problem, as text on the page might mask whatever is going on.

[Spencer]

I would double check everything that I had done for the past 6 months. Looking especially for hidden links and mention of the hackers handle, as mentioned in my earlier post. It's easy to assume the problem is a simple matter, when hackers tend to work multi-dimentionally. So you should at least cover yourself with a full site check for everyone that you represent, this could be the first of many (fingers crossed it's not).

If only one site messed with, I would always assume that Google may feel the need to penalise the site eventually, so I would always consider a domain change and relaunch.

Best of Luck