Here is the story. I was doing competition analysis for ‘video surveillance’ keyword which one of my clients wanted to optimize their site for. When I was searching Google.com, I found a *very*strange listing ranking at position 23. The listing was for a site ipvideomarket.info (The site is now ranking at position 19 at the time of writing this post). The listing drew my attention as the page title and meta description were totally irrelevant to the search term. Normally, you would expect mention of the search term (’video surveillance’ in this case) either in page title, meta description (or both) or in snippet from the page showing the searched term in bold. But not in this case. What drew my attention was that while Google was showing URL as ipvideomarket.info in search listings but page title and meta description talked about bevitalia.it. In fact, the page title and meta description for ipvideomarket.info’ s listing in Google came from this page on Alexa which is a statistics page for bevitalia.it.

What I saw in Google SERP and the actual title and meta description from the site are given below.

Screwed up page title as shown in Google.com results:

“bevitalia.it – Traffic Details from Alexa”

Actual page title on the site:

“IP Video Surveillance News and Reviews | IPVideoMarket.info”

Screwed up meta description:

“bevitalia.it is ranked number 4526881 in the world according to the Alexa Traffic Rank”

Actual meta description on the site:

“IPVideoMarket.info is one of the most comprehensive sources for information on video surveillance. We’ve presented video surveillance information in the easiest, most user-friendly way to discover the best information on video surveillance across the web.”

Given below is the screenshot of the Google SERP taken soon after the listing was noticed:

(Click the image above to enlarge it)

After seeing the site’s listing in Google SERPs, I visited the site (ipvideomarket.info) to see what actually was appearing on the site. As you guessed, the site was showing page title and meta description, which were relevant with the site’s theme and the keyword ‘video surveillance’ and nowhere close to what Google was showing in its SERP.

I kept checking the Google SERP to see how long the problem lasted. After about six hours, the problem disappeared and Google started showing the actual page title and meta description from the site. However, post-correction, the site’s ranking didn’t change and it kept ranking at position 23 where it was ranking before the correction was made by Google.

Though I saw something like this first time, I am probably not the first person (and probably not the last either) to see it.

So, what’s going on here? Any thoughts?

Though it may seem to be a one-off case, it’s important to investigate. Why? Imagine running a successful ecommerce site ranking at position 1 in Google and Google shows page title and meta description from some porn, Viagra, or gambling site.  OK, I am exaggerating but it’s possible. Isn’t it?

I will make a post on the topic to share my thoughts on what possibly could have caused the problem. In the meantime, I invite you to share your insights on the issue. Let’s hope someone from Google reads the post and lets the webmaster community know how this could have happened and what webmasters can do (if they can do anything at all) to prevent it from happening for their sites.

This is a “do-follow” blog but only useful comments that are relevant and contribute meaningfully will be approved. Thank you all for your time.

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