
The most mysterious Google ranking ever... - ry0ohki
http://jamespanderson.tumblr.com/post/2744065946/most-mysterious-google-ranking-ever
======
andrenotgiant
It's a super rare HTTP Response Code issue:

STEP 1: Accessing CakeCentral.com returns a 404 "Not Found" HTTP Code when
requested:

1\. Go to <http://www.rexswain.com/httpview.html> and enter in
<http://cakecentral.com/>

2\. Take a look at the response codes, see the 404

STEP 2: Previously, inexplicably, _actual_ error pages on CakeCentral.com such
as:
[http://www.google.com/search?q=site:www.cakecentral.com%2Fca...](http://www.google.com/search?q=site:www.cakecentral.com%2Fcake-
decorating-photos.html) returned 302 redirects to Beerby.com

STEP 3: Beerby.com uses a "Soft" error page, meaning if you type in a URL
like: <http://www.beerby.com/adfadi> you get a 302 TEMPORARY redirect to a 200
OK page.

~~~
ry0ohki
I think you're on the right trail, but it's still confusing why this would
take the number one ranking over the root domain? Maybe Google thought the
entire domain had moved?

~~~
andrenotgiant
Yeah i bet they think that is the temporary location of the cakecentral
homepage

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acangiano
It is definitely an anomaly. Take a look at the following comparison between
the top 10 results for the keyword "cake central". It's worse than the other
results in every significant way, yet it sits at #1.

<http://grab.by/grabs/32ac4e9cade57bedcc96c8e42fb66a2f.png>

DA = Domain Age

PR = Page Rank

IC = Indexed Content (pages)

BLP= Backlinks for the page

BLD = Backlinks for the domain

BLEG = Backlinks from .edu/.gov pages

DMZ = Listed in DMOZ

YAH = Listed in Yahoo Directory

Title, URL, Desc, Head = Whether the keyword is included in any of those

CA = Google Cache age

~~~
limmeau
Where does one go to get such a table?

~~~
acangiano
Market Samurai: <http://www.marketsamurai.com/c/Antonio> (referral link). It's
an excellent (and expensive) program for internet marketing and SEO research,
available for Mac and Windows (it's made in Flex/Air). If you buy during the
trial period, you can get a big discount though. I got my copy for $97.

Screenshot of the screen from which the table has been taken:
<http://grab.by/grabs/323101a2a3382f4c75b2f077a481931c.png>

~~~
ddemchuk
shameless affiliate link drop man, come on now

------
pieter
Interesting that people, when searching for 'cake central', still click on a
link with a title saying 'ERROR: backend server did not respond in time' even
though the second result has 'CakeCentral' in bold.

~~~
scotty79
Maybe they are Feeling Lucky ?

~~~
infinity
So many lucky users? :)

In an interview with the Washington Post in 2006 Marissa Mayer from Google
said that almost no one ever uses the "I'm feeling lucky" button:

[http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-
dyn/content/article/2006/10...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-
dyn/content/article/2006/10/02/AR2006100201277_pf.html)

But maybe in 2011 Google users are luckier.

------
franze
ok, could it be that they both have the same server hosting company?

because here we see a beerby page with a cakecentral URL
[http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Acakecentral.com+beerby...](http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Acakecentral.com+beerby&hl=all&pws=0)

i would guess it was either a server (housing) accident or a DNS f*ckup that
let beerby and cakecentral switch places (in an erroneous state) for a short
time, bad thing google picked u the cakecentral home page URL in that moment.
it saw it as either a redirect or a direct douplicate of the beerby site and
decided to show the older indexed page with the same content (the beerby error
page).

yeah, either this or google screwed up.

update: why i guess this is because i have seen similar errors when sombody
screws up redirects from the home page. (makes HTTP 302 redirects from the
home page to another page, and that page (or the redirect) is then changed to
something else...) but this is the first time i ever see such an error between
two unrelated sites.

~~~
infinity
I could reproduce this weird behaviour. First I thought that there might be
some pages linking to the error page with the anchor text in question - this
is also what the cache page claims. Also there are many scraper and auto
generated spam sites with broken links that never really show up in the Google
index.

Similar cases have happened before. There is a forum by Google for Webmasters
where you can tell Google about problems with your website:

<http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters?hl=en>

You could tell them your findings and maybe someone from the Google team will
look into the matter, if you are lucky.

------
speleding
This is the reason you should always configure your web server to serve an
HTTP 503 "Unavailable" when your backend is not online or not fast enough.
This will tell the Google bot to come back later and not index the result.

------
funkdobiest
Could this be some new slang term that is not quite popular yet? "Cake
central" = drinking lots of beer. "The other day I got caked at that bar, it
was cake central down there"

~~~
tony584
its not on urban dictionary ... yet...

------
infinity
Looking at the Google cache page I see this:

These terms only appear in links pointing to this page: cake central

Looks like the good old Google bombs still work :)
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_bomb>

~~~
franze
definitely not a google bomb. just checked their incoming links, and well
there are not links which target "cake central"

the note

"These terms only appear in links pointing to this page: cake central"

always shows up as soon as the query words could not get found on the cached
page.

~~~
infinity
Yes, there seems to be something else that is wrong with the Google index as
some pages from the cakecentral.com domain show up with content from beerby -
this has been noted by someone in this thread and I could just reproduce it.

On the other hand, we can never be sure if pages exist or where they are on
the web that link to our pages with a certain anchor text. The link: operator
is broken since a long time and shows only a small subset of the pages linking
to the page in question if anything at all.

A more complete list of links can be found in the Google Webmaster Tools, but
this is also never 100% complete or up to date. And we can use the Site
Explorer to get on the quest to find a certain link:

<http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/>

~~~
franze
siteexplorer is more than useless, and the google link: operator is crippled,
but for a link bomb you need quite some links with the exact matching
linktext, but a simple search for ["cake central" beerby] does not show
anything. (and other queries with the link: inanchor: oprators, too) so that
it can be relativly safely assumed that it is not a link bomb (in a link bomb
you always find some of the links)

or lets phrase it like this

there is absence of evidence that it was a link bomb

------
eli
I'm pretty sure the web crawl Google does to figure out your rankings is
separate from the one that saves the cached version and probably that snippet.

That said, I have no idea why that page would rank on those terms, error or
not.

------
trustfundbaby
Real Head scratcher. Waiting for Matt Cutts to hop on here and explain this.

------
cpr
Doesn't this just reflect the dirty little secret that Google doesn't really
have to get any particular details right, just mostly right most of the time?

------
rouli
another interesting thing to notice is that Google instant comes with the
right result (cakecentral.com). Only when I press enter (or the search button)
I get to the beerby.com result. Google instant does however claim that it's
showing results for cake central magazine and I can search instead for "cake
central".

EDIT: even better - searching for cakecentral.com also leads to the same error
page on beerby.com

------
Sadranyc
There was a similar ranking some months ago involving searching for "vatican"
in Google [http://news.ninemsn.com.au/technology/7931120/vatican-
search...](http://news.ninemsn.com.au/technology/7931120/vatican-search-hits-
wrong-website)

------
chanux
I tried whoishostingthis.com on both beerby.com and cakecentral.com to get
reported of 404 error.

Edit: It worked at the second attempt beerby.com is hosted at Acquia hosting
and cakecentral.com at Amazon

~~~
ry0ohki
hmm? Beerby is on Amazon too actually

~~~
chanux
<http://www.whoishostingthis.com/beerby.com>

~~~
ry0ohki
That's all well and good, but I'm one of the owners of Beerby and I can tell
you for sure it's on Amazon EC2 :)

------
EGreg
This likely happens when a page was the top result but then got re-spidered.
Google probably keeps the old rank for a while, even though the content has
changed.

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bherms
Using CakePHP framework? That wouldn't affect it, but that's the first thing
that popped into my mind.

~~~
ry0ohki
Good thought, but we're not using CakePHP

------
webuiarchitect
That's really an interesting find.

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chmike
Google bombing ? ;)

In popular french "cake traces" refers to brown marks in underpants. I guess
the french expression "cake face" is a subsequent derivation from it. So I'm
trying to guess what "cake central" might mean ...

------
wowfat
looks like it is fixed now

