Strange description in Altavista

Anyone shed light on this?

[allybongo]

A prospective client has come to us regarding his homepage. He paid for altavista but when it was indexed it looked like this:-

Clients Homepage
7a. 1f. 185 95. 1e. fa. 2b. 182. 127. 125. 112. 131. 8. 6. 6. 9. 7. 19. 3f. 1e. 20f. 214. 1f7. 216. 1e8. 93. a0. bit of text - bit of text. 6. 9. 7.
18. 51. 1e. d6. 6. 9. 7. bb. bit of text
www.clientsite.com/ * Refreshed in past 24 hours * Related Pages *Translate

There aren't any meta tags in there but neither can I find any of the strange description in his homepage apart from the odd bits of text. Obviously I'm going to suggest meta tags and some more text but can anyone tell me what those strange numbers are? BTW, he does have some session id numbers on the end of urls, dont know whether that's anything to do with it.

Cheers :)

[Grumpus]

It looks like the bot is reading the file as a raw binary rather than letting the file execute and display. What's the extension on the file?

G.

[allybongo]

Its a .asp file

[vroom]

That sounds just like a description of how search engines will optimize storage (see search engine research forum) by converting most words into two byte representations.

Perhaps with all their changes they are simply showing a raw representation of what they have stored instead of the translation? Long live bugs... :)

[allybongo]

thanks for that guys, do you think if I suggest meta description tag that it will use that instead?

:)