What The Hey?!?! A Top 10 Result For Non Existent Content

[Planet13]

Hi Everyone;

First The Good News:

The home page of Site A has made it on to the first page of the SERPs for one of my keywords (widget gizmos).

Woohoo!

And Now The Bad News:

Site A, the one that made it on to Page 1, NO LONGER SELLS WIDGET GIZMOS!

I moved all of my Widget Gizmos back in February 2010 to Site B, which I had been optimizing for the keywords "widget gizmos" since October 2009.

In fact, the only place left on Site A where it even mentions widget gizmos is on the home page, where it says;

"Dear Customers; all of our [url]widget gizmos[/url] have been moved to Site B"

(where the word widget gizmos is a link to the /widget-gizmos.html page on Site B.)

In fact, the SERPS shows that snippet that mentions widget gizmos have been moved to a different site.

So of course, Site A ranks #9 for "widget gizmos" while Site B ranks #17 for widget gizmos.

This is totally nutter! The last time Site A ranked on Page 1 for the keyword widget gizmos was on the eve of the Florida Update, late fall 2003.

All I can think of is that since Site A used to sell widget gizmos, I must have one or two really strong back links that still point to the index page of site A with the anchor text widget gizmos.

Any thoughts? Should I move all my widget gizmos BACK to site A? Should I just give up and look for a new job?

[Planet13]

BTW: I forgot to mention that I did the appropriate 301 redirects from Site A to the respective pages on Site B.

and also, after I moved all the widget gizmos related material to Site B, Site A immediately dropped out of the SERPs entirely for widget gizmos - until today.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

I witnessed something similar in early 2010 and my conclusion then was that the removal of a "for sale" footprint unlocked the visitor flow. I couldn't be sure but it made sense.

[indyank]

Aren't you 301 redirecting the home page of Site A to site B?

This again suggests some huge back end updates happening in google's infrastructure, as I mentioned in another thread. This is also triggering huge 404 reports in WMT, for pages that have been removed years ago.

My guess is google is having a huge database of entire sites on its servers. These include versions of every page (a complete history of the evolution of every page, since it was created), including deleted pages. They are probably trying to clean up this database and retain only the relevant pages.

Keep a watch on how long this page remains in page 1 and how it moves in the SERPS. I feel that it will soon disappear.

[Shatner]

Been seeing tons of this since Panda.

My favorite example is that there's a scraper out there who only scrapes my headlines, throws them on a blank post with about 5 adsense ads, and then routinely ranks #1 for keywords, outranking my actual content.

[dickbaker]

I run across a lot of 404's on page one.

[falsepositive]

Shatner, that's how scrapers do it now. They don't even bother scraping your content. They can throw you out of the SERPs simply by showing YOUR title. It's ridiculous. I've seen these pages up there with NO content, no back links -- pure autoblogs -- just ranking for these titles. That's Panda for you.

[Planet13]

Aren't you 301 redirecting the home page of Site A to site B?

Actually, no.

I only moved about HALF the total content from Site A to Site B (the content related to widget gizmos).

Since half the content was going to stay on Site A, I certainly didn't want to redirect the home page of Site A to Site B.

This again suggests some huge back end updates happening in google's infrastructure, as I mentioned in another thread...

I believe you are on to something. Have you noticed how many people have started finding old broken links reports in Web master tools? I think that google is reconstructing a lot of the past to make snapshots of how entire sites looked and evolved over the years - pure speculation on my part.

But I think that the caffeine architecture enhancements might allow google to "archive' things a little more thoroughly.

[Planet13]

Upon further review...

It looks like this is caused primarily by personalized search.

When I search for widget gizmos, site A appears in spot #10

When others do it, it only appears on Page 4

Still page 4 seems quite high, considering all material relating to widget gizmos was moved back in the middle of February (except for the link to Site B).

(Site B still appears at position #17 whether I search or whether anyone else searches for it.)

So, I guess it is a testament to the power of personalized search...

[Shatner]

>>>Shatner, that's how scrapers do it now. They don't even bother scraping your content. They can throw you out of the SERPs simply by showing YOUR title.

The really fun thing about this is that there's nothing you can do about it, because Google won't take action on a DMCA request for a title.