Posted by Simon Howland August 11th, 2010
Upon the recent launch of our new LBi.com site we were alarmed to notice that Google was sending visitors to the wrong site!
As you can see below, at the time of writing, a search for [lbi.com] in google.co.uk will display a result for the Leo Baeck Institute in New York, a site about the history and culture of German speaking Jewry hosted on the domain ‘lbi.org’. The ‘sitelinks’ underneath the top result also erroneously refer and link to pages on the lbi.org domain:
This is badly wrong. As it happens, this is not a major disaster for LBi, but it could be much different for our natural search clients, who could lose significant revenues as a result of this kind of error.
So why did this happen?
There are no configurations or logical connections between the “lbi.com” site and the “lbi.org” site which could have mislead Google, leaving only two options; an error in Google code, or an error in a manually edited result – the latter of which we believe to be the most likely reason.
This is a very rare occurance that gives us an insight into the world of Google, in particular how some results are so well positioned, despite there being no ‘apparent’ reason for them to be performing so well.
We do see this from time to time, although it should be stressed that the overwhelming majority of sites will never see this kind of manual intervention, and usual best practices still apply.
One reason this result may have been singled out is due to Google’s recent focus on branded search. We suspect that brand results are one of the items currently being identified and prioritised by Google for search quality purposes.
Why would Google be manually editing search results in 2010?
Manually editing SERPS is more common than you might think. It happens for numerous reasons, from legal requests for removal of content, to handing out “black hat” SEO penalties, to delivering expected results for high volume navigational queries where, for example, a user is searching for a branded website.
Search engines have a conundrum, in that they need websites to be included in their index to attract searchers. If they remove websites for infringing terms and conditions no matter who they are, search engine users would soon get fed up and find another search engine. Likewise, if a search engine doesn’t surface expected results for a query because the site a user seeks is not optimised well enough to naturally be top of the search engine results, search engines reserve the right to manually edit results.
This introduces the potential for human error, which we believe is the case for the erroneous result demonstrated here.
Digging a little deeper:
The cached copy of this page, shown below as indexed on the 7th of August, clearly shows “lbi.com” in the cache URL, but “lbi.org” in the cache description. This is only the case for the homepage, for the phrase [lbi.com]:
The same error is evidenced with a search for [lbi.com] on the google.com site:
The same is also true for a “site:” operator search, which should only return pages from the “lbi.com” domain:
A search for [lbi] shows the expected results, including the correct ‘lbi.com’ homepage, so this is definitely included in the index:
The Leo Baeck Institute website (lbi.org) has no such error, showing that there is not a plain switch of site home pages:
We’ve dropped Google a line and will post further updates here when we hear any news back from them…
Update: Once we highlighted this, Google’s own John Mueller provided a response in the comments below, and within 24 hours the result for [lbi.com] has now been changed to display the expected results, with an LBi.com title, snippet and sitelinks appearing at the top of the page. We would like to extend our thanks to Google for ensuring a swift resolution.
Upon the recent launch of our new LBi.com site we were alarmed to notice that Google was sending visitors to the wrong site!
As you can see below, at the time of writing, a search for [lbi.com] in google.co.uk will display a result for the Leo Baeck Institute in New York, a site about the history and culture of German speaking Jewry hosted at the domain ‘lbi.org’:
Tags: Google, LBi, search, SEO
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