These terms only appear in links pointing to this page: gobbledygook

[webdevfv]

Looking through the Google cached version of a number of our web pages I'm coming across this:

These search terms are highlighted: search These terms only appear in links pointing to this page: hl en&biw 2144&bih 939&q

I was searching on widgetbrandname specific widget model

None of the search terms are highlighted on the page even though are dotted all over the page.

Is this a known problem or have I found the reason as to why google doesn't rank my product pages and brandname category pages.

Any advice greatly received.

TIA
Kevin

[tedster]

I've seen this kind of cached page issue once in a while - even on pages that are not having a ranking problem. My take on this so far is that the cache display is a separate function from ranking - it even uses different data centers. So whatever bugs you see in a cached page display are not a reflection of the ranking process... at least not usually.

Have you checked your character set declarations, both in the server header and in the meta tag?

[webdevfv]

I did a different search using site:mysite.co.uk and the same search terms.

The page is indexed and the search terms are highlighted!

This might be confusing so I'll recap:


NORMAL USER SEARCH
--------------------
widgetbrandname specific widget model

I get a number of results - it seems it has linked my site to these keywords and offers a few blog posts etc but not the product page.

If I click on the link Show more results from mysite.co.uk I am offered the product page as the first of one of the results.

If I take a look at the cache I get the cryptic message and none of the search terms are highlighted.



WEBMASTER SEARCH
--------------------
site:mysite.co.uk widgetbrandname specific widget model

The product page is ranked No.1 and the cached page shows all the usual highlighted terms.


------------------

PS I recently wrote to Google and yesterday received a reply stating there were no banning/penalty issues affecting my site.

[Robert Charlton]

There's a thread from about a month ago in the Review My Site forum in Supporters... [webmasterworld.com...] which reports this message in cache, not the same as yours, but maybe similar enough that it might be helpful (assuming you have access to Supporters). The message is...

Your search - cache:WqkiCB-FYCkJ:www.example.com/
widgetsinfo - did not match any documents.

I have no idea if this is related to yours... just thought I'd pass it on.

[webdevfv]

Thanks for the reply Robert. Unfortunately I cannot access that thread as I'm not signed up (I should do and probably will do one day) which is why I couldn't find anything similar from the last year or so.

Could I ask what the general consensus is?

[tedster]

No consensus yet, but there is a possibility in that case of a DNS or IP address conflict.

[milosevic]

I've just witnessed this exact issue while trying to find a link to some content on a site where it's link from the main page had broken. I found a page with an old non-friendly URL link which turned out to still work. However, using the cached search to find the highlighted text I wanted quickly was very strange.

These terms only appear in links pointing to this page: search hl en&biw 1920&bih 1036&q

This is on a (general interest, non-commercial) site which has been completely inactive for a couple of years. Note I was searching for a three word "name of article", which weren't referenced on the cached page I looked at all. I did find them on the page as shown in the SERP with f3. Seems like some sort of gremlins at Google's end to me

[lucy24]

These terms only appear in links pointing to this page: search hl en&biw 1920&bih 1036&q

This is on a (general interest, non-commercial) site which has been completely inactive for a couple of years. Note I was searching for a three word "name of article", which weren't referenced on the cached page I looked at all. I did find them on the page as shown in the SERP with f3. Seems like some sort of gremlins at Google's end to me

Y'know, that's actually kinda fascinating when you stop and look at it. That snippet of text is of course the kind of thing you'd see in the "referer" line of your logs-- the ones where a search engine throws in every speck of information it can gather, including where the silicon was mined and what brand of coffee the user is most likely to spill on his monitor. To a machine, they're all "referers", no different from a human click on a direct link.

[g1smd]

I have a suspicion this happens when Google has a copy of your content, which they can show you when you ask for their cache, but surprisingly that content hasn't actually been indexed. In effect, Google doesn't actually yet know what words are on the page they are showing you. There was also some behaviour like this wrapped up in Supplemental Results handling several years ago.

[webdevfv]

On my WEBMASTER SEARCH (see post 3) example though it appears that the page is indexed as it is working fine in that instance.