Help me with a serious Google problem!

[Barry]

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As you prob know mate I am not far behind you for the brand search term being investigated in this thread anyway.

So I know exactly what you mean.

For me didnt take any special or deviant SEO - just wrote a review of their site and uploaded it - just like the hundreds of other god damn reviews I do every week.

'I was just doin my job guvnor'

(god cant you tell its nearly the weekend and the san miguel' is flowing!)

[kier]

Hi guys,

We haven't removed any link nor to my knowledge have the merchant or their SEO company so this looks like another roll of the Google dice.

[Barry]

Lets hope the dice don't come up blank - you know, cos those guys at google have 7 sided dice you know.

The whole industry sometimes feels like it revolves around google and a computer program - what a state for our industry to be in - what a state!!!

Def all down to google. Crazy.

[Qui Gon Jinn]

Stupid question, but not so stupid as it's a project I am working on. What if you own a small search engine & it does this which can easily be done deliberately & non deliberately... fine you are the owner ... your site I assume. Then apply this to what if you have shares, no matter how little, in a search engine.. Actually after typing this I think I will go back to bed.

Anyhow if the aff id is changing perhaps we shall all get a bite of the cherry.

[km8]

I can now inform you that Google have done an update and the url has changed ... now another affiliate tracking code is in its place, instead of mine.

.. or the merchant's url.

To me, that suggests that there is something Google doesn't like about the merchant's URL or site - which, in turn suggests that befuddle didn't do anything wrong to cause this problem. More likely, the merchant (directly or via their SEO contractor) did.

N'est pa?

[Barry]

Its just a glitch - IMO opinion, google used to wait months to iron out an update before releasing it now its pretty much dynamic - which mean you get a few strange results every now and then.

IMO Bedtstar changed their content - then before googlebot could index it via the main domain it picked up via a webgains 302 redirect - which it then indexed.

It will sort itself out.

Note to self - (googlebot is not real and cannot be held responsible for anything - i mean anything!)

[drivetowin]

Maybe Google doesn't like the 'Listed on Google' link at the bottom of every page of the site - kind of ironic now!!

[Barry]

Ahaha well spotted keith.

To add, any SEO company who doesn't advise a merchant having at least a landing page at the main index/domain of the site and not a 301 redirect to an internal catalogue page has to be slightly mad, surely?

[km8]

Maybe Google doesn't like the 'Listed on Google' link at the bottom of every page of the site - kind of ironic now!!

I like it! Maybe they should change the anchor text to "Not listed on Google".

That link goes to a page of Google results that shows the BedStar url for the first paid ad (which goes via an affiliate link) and an affiliate link for the first natural result, with Bedstar itself nowhere on the first page.

What is the purpose of that link?
It's right at the bottom of the page where it's unlikely that anybody except a bot is going to follow it. Who is it meant to help or impress? Google maybe? If so, it has backfired, bigtime. It surely does nothing to improve the visitor experience. So why is it there?

The more I see of this, the more it looks like BedStar (maybe via their SEO contractor) dropped a major clanger.

[km8]

Ahaha well spotted keith.

To add, any SEO company who doesn't advise a merchant having at least a landing page at the main index/domain of the site and not a 301 redirect to an internal catalogue page has to be slightly mad, surely?

Agreed. I'm no SEO guru but that too looks distinctly odd.

[drivetowin]

I don't think the start page is too much of a concern, I've got a number of sites that do a 301 to the start page and they don't seem to suffer in the rankings.

The more I look at their page I'm sure that link at the bottom has something to do with it - the fact that it is not just a link to google but a link which actually searches for Bedstar - I think Google has spotted a black hat hanging on the rack.

[moredial]

The more I see of this, the more it looks like BedStar (maybe via their SEO contractor) dropped a major clanger.

I don't know enough about bedstar to voice an opinion about that.

There are hundreds of things which could have caused this and the only way to solve it is to work through them one by one. Just now the url that has replaced bedstar is webgains so that is where one must look for the first step towards correcting the issue. Unfortunately the test they are making with their robots.txt file has the wrong syntax so the 302 redirect is still being treated correctly by Google, even though that treatment is not the treatment expected by their programmer.

You may not like the way in which Google is indexing the page, but Google is both following the rules of the 302 redirect and applying its algorithm of offering the shortest url in the search results when it is unsure of the true ownership of the content (as per Matt Cutts blog). If as you say bedstar have just updated their site it is highly probable that the webgains link was indexed before the very long 3 directories deep url that bedstar uses for their home page and when Google did get around to that deep url the content was seen to be a duplicate of that which has already been indexed.

Just to be fair, I searched on bedstar.co.uk and found the following information:

"Notice! The following unexpected content was found in the robots.txt file located at http: // www. bedstar.co.uk/robots.txt which does not comply with the current "Robots Exclusion Standard". If this is directed to a specific User-Agent (robot) that accepts the following then you can ignore this message. Otherwise it is suggested this be removed. Please verify the robots.txt file before submitting to search engines:

Sitemap: <http: // www. bedstar.co.uk/sitemap.xml>

The "Robots Exclusion Standard" is simple:

The record starts with a User-agent: line, followed by one or more Allow: or Disallow: lines. Wildcards (ie, *) in the Allow: or Disallow: directive is not allowed. Lines that do not comply to this are to be ignored.

WARNING! The URL you entered sent a redirect Location: HEADER response. Below are the redirect Location: HEADER responses sent by your Web server which the analyzer followed in the order received:

Redirect URL: http: // www. bedstar.co.uk/shop/catalog/index.html

Not many search engines will follow redirects."

Is it any wonder that with potentially hundreds of links all pointing to different redirects which display the same content that Google got it 'wrong'.

Googlebot is only a script that follows a mathematical formula and the logic of that. It can't read, it can't see, it can only record the content of a page and record which url was used to get that content. And that is all it has done.

I am one of the first to complain about Google and the many gremlins which show it to be a badly 'broken' search engine, but everyone here knows that the Google ranking algorithms are a lot easier to work out than those of the other search engines and that even a beginner can rank on Google.

This case has nothing to do with any gremlin or any ranking algorithm. Yahoo will be treating the links the same. The search engines are not to blame and nor is the affiliate.

[DaveN]

personally if I was Bedstar i would be asking the question to the SEO company how did this happen, what if it was a competitor that had done this give me away out !!! ...

and if I was the consultant for the seo company i would be saying that we should 302 the point of access to another internal page daisy chaining the 302 string in a hope that google will switch it out again.. 9 times out of 10 that works..

on taking the aff money because of this thats stupid Bedstar should pay him bonus and keep webgains they sweet at the moment webgains controllers the traffic, I would agree a bonus and setup the AFF with a new tracking code and let the old code go 0 commission after the bonus is paid.

DaveN

[QualityNonsense]

I've had the same quirk with Webgains tracking URLs getting indexed by Google. It happened when I used an .HTACCESS redirect to mask an affiliate link but forgot to explicitly specify a 301 header.

So if the affiliate is using something like...

Redirect /MyMaskedLink hxxp://track.webgains.com

...they ought to use:

Redirect 301 /MyMaskedLink hxxp://track.webgains.com

You can also set a 301 header with a PHP redirect, if that's how the affiliate is masking affiliate links.

(Be sure to double check your HTACCESS file, as even minor typos will bring your site tumbling down).

[moredial]

I have asked a contact of mine who has better tools than the ones I use to look into all this. The full response is being PMed to webgains so that they have all the info they need.

Basically the situation is:

Webgains are doing everything they can do to prevent Google showing their URL in the SERPs.

Bedstar also have their server set up correctly. Which also means that those who are belittling their SEO consultants are in error and are passing judgement without knowing enough of the facts.

The combination of what webgains and bedstar are doing is correct.

I must, therefore, retract my earlier comment and say: Google, you got it wrong. AGAIN.

As a search engine, Google is broken. It was 'broken' when it was first written and has remained broken ever since. Most search engines have been broken in one way or another but Google is the one that has survived and lived on rather than being dropped by internet users.

If you don't like the way Google displays the results then stop supporting Google. Stop using gmail, adwords, adsense, google alerts, google analytics, etc and stop using Google as a search engine. Ban Google from your sites via the robots.txt. And tell everyone else to do so also.

If you feel you have to use Google with its 'free webmaster tools' that give Google all the marketing research they need to succeed as an advertiser, then it is you personally that is helping Google to succeed as a bad search engine and a very good advertiser.

And that is all I will say on the matter.