Google broken or Google’s new bid to win the search wars?
-
Lee
4 years ago -
1180
views
Musa (SEO team) found that Google was playing silly buggers with a result this morning.
Here’s what’s happening:
1. Do a search for the term ‘Artflux’
2. Look at the number 3 result (which should be artflux.com)
3. Try clicking the link to Artflux
4. Stay in Google
So a very interesting ploy from Google - Offer the result, but keep the visitor in Google!
We have tried on different systems (Mac and PC), different networks, logged in and logged out and we get the same thing every time.
No traffic is getting through to Artflux, Google is keeping the lot!
Is there something Artflux are not telling us? Have they been bought out by Google? Or is this simply a case of Google getting it wrong for once?
What do you think, have you seen this before?
If so how long will this non-click through state last?
See Google results for Artflux
See Artflux
10 comments so far to - Google broken or Google’s new bid to win the search wars? -
You guys really search a story after every little mistake do you…
Very interesting, the site appears to be down that is going too, maybe google is detecting this and not delivering the error?
take a look at this…
http://gsitecrawler.com/tools/server-status.aspx
URL=http://www.artflux.com
Result code: 302 (Found / Moved Temporarily)
New location: main.asp?curr=USD
Location is not an absolute URL!
Assuming new URL is: http://www.artflux.com/main.asp?curr=USD
URL=http://www.artflux.com/main.asp
Error: A timeout occured, could not process your URL.
what is your .htaccess file doing? why a 302?
btw opening it in an IE tab worked fine, very odd…
when i try to view your page as googlebot its saying
Invalid URL or server does not respond, HTTP return code: 302
So you have some weird problems going on, are you cloaking or is this site hacked and using a weird .htaccess?
Actually it’s ArtFlux’s own error… their homepage is set to redirect to any page that refers it.
Try clicking on your own link. Artflux.com redirects to your blog ;-)
Nothing to do with Google – its a problem with that website.
It is redirecting to the referring URL – if you follow the link from this blog post, it redirects back to this blog post.
Yes, we saw it was 302; we thought it would be fun to run with the story to highlight the simplest of errors with site configuration can cause problems.
how comes the link to artflux in your article re-directs back to this article?
From what I can tell, when you load the site, it is using geoip or something to determine your currency, then redirecting to the referral URI. when you type the address directly, it correctly loads the artflux site, when you click from a link, it is redirecting to the original referrer, instead of the main.asp page.
Just click the CACHED link underneath, and it will take you to the site.
Yes, as spotted by several of you, there’s a 302 redirect on the Artflux website that redirects a user back to the referring URL. Weirdest (and dumbest) way of handling an error that I ever saw.
So, using Sam Spade to capture the header info, we see the following returned:
HTTP/1.1 302 Object moved
Cache-Control: private
Connection: close
Date: Wed, 28 May 2008 13:22:30 GMT
Content-Length: 138
Content-Type: text/html
Location: main.asp?curr=GBP
Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0
X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
Set-Cookie: customer=firstvisit=285&visitorid=676395441&customerid=0&visitorstat=R; expires=Sat, 12-Dec-2037 00:00:00 GMT; path=/
Set-Cookie: ASPSESSIONIDQACRSAAQ=HGJPAFICCMNHENNBDGALNJEN; path=/
Object moved
Object MovedThis object may be found here.
Now, this has actually shown us what they seem to have been trying to do:
See how when I hit the page from the UK it attempts to redirect me to main.asp?curr=GBP which is different to what Ben reported from the Google tool
URL=http://www.artflux.com
Result code: 302 (Found / Moved Temporarily)
New location: main.asp?curr=USD
Location is not an absolute URL!
Assuming new URL is: http://www.artflux.com/main.asp?curr=USD
See?
My UK IP is being used to determine that I should get the content with ?curr=GBP (Pounds Sterling currency) while the US IP of the tool was being detected as reason to get the content with the ?curr=USD (US Dollars) query string parameter.
Why pass that through a parameter anyway when the visitor is being served cookies anyway? Couldn’t tell you.
Isn’t that one of the daftest screw-ups ever seen? Nope, I’ve sadly seen worse. Much worse. But it takes the prize for this month.