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View Full Version : Strange Google Search result for my site. Hack?



brain357
01-24-2016, 01:32 PM
This morning I noticed google is giving a very strange search result for my website. The Title is wrong and just completely different. Seems to be referencing a page on tumblr. Very strange. The result also uses https and the description is this: A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more.

The link still goes to my website, the https seems weird cause my site is only secure in the shopping cart and the link goes to homepage.

Searching the source on the landing page from the google link the title and description look normal. Also see no reference to what google is using as the title. Is this some sort of weird hack? I just switched hosting 2 weeks ago and search results were fine till today.

Webmaster tools is not giving me any issues.

If I search using my domain the results are normal. This search is using my company name.

Is this some sort of hack or has google bots just messed up somehow?

My new hosting is saying it is because my robots.txt blocks the crawling of https by default and google should fix this with future crawls.

Google only search engine giving weird results at this time.

Hosting says I just need to wait it out. Any thoughts?

Harold Mansfield
01-24-2016, 02:05 PM
We need to see the link or search result. We can't guess from your description.
What kind of site is it? WordPress? HTML?
Are you self hosting, or is it on a site builder like Squarespace?

If your robots.txt is blocking something, Google isn't going to fix it for you.
Also who is your host?

Again, we need to see it or we're just swinging wildly in the dark.

krymson
01-29-2016, 02:23 PM
I recently noticed this too on my day job's website. What it is, is based on the search term Google changes the title to be more inline with searcher intent. This has been going on for a while now and freaked me out because I saw it last week and was the first time I had seen it. It pulls relevant content form the page and replaces it. Now if you have info from tumbler on your site it could be using that information from the referenced tumbler page. For us, for the title it used text that was in our navigation, and the description was an excerpt pulled out of a paragraph 3 paragraphs down on the page. It was odd and took some investigating and I'm still not 100% clear on it, but here's some decent references:

https://www.v9seo.com/blog/2015/03/18/9-reasons-why-google-changed-your-title-tag/

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35624?hl=en
-Specifically this piece...- "If we’ve detected that a particular result has one of the above issues with its title, we may try to generate an improved title from anchors, on-page text, or other sources. However, sometimes even pages with well-formulated, concise, descriptive titles will end up with different titles in our search results to better indicate their relevance to the query. There’s a simple reason for this: the title tag as specified by a webmaster is limited to being static, fixed regardless of the query. Once we know the user’s query, we can often find alternative text from a page that better explains why that result is relevant. Using this alternative text as a title helps the user, and it also can help your site. Users are scanning for their query terms or other signs of relevance in the results, and a title that is tailored for the query can increase the chances that they will click through."