Google showing my content on the serps in a different domain
-
Hi all,
Recently a partner of ours discovered that Google is showing a meta description on the serps for his homepage that is not his but ours. On his site, he sells add-ons for our software, so the name of our software appears many times and as well there are many links pointing to our site.
He claims he hasn´t copied this text from us, and I have used some tools to verify this. I don´t understand how Google can get confused and show our text as the meta desctiption on the serps for his homepage.
Any idea on why this happened?
-
Hey there
So Chris is right, this isn't always the meta description showing, but often snippets of text based upon what the searcher typed. But Google is getting the text from somewhere on the partner's website.
One thing you should do is check Google's text only cache - type cache:www.domain.com/url-name (adding cache: in front will give you Google's cache - and then click "text-only" in the top right. Search for the text in question there. It's possible either the content is "hidden" somehow but crawled, or maybe it used to be there, and it's still in Google's cache even thought the current page is different.
-
A couple of things come to mind Paessier:
Firstly, what shows up in the search results is a "snippet", which is usually composed of the title tag, along with some or all of the description meta tag, and/or some copy from the body of the page. Additionally, the snippet for a page can change based on the search query, so it's pretty difficult for two pages on different domains to share the exact same snippet (but not necessarily impossible). You can easily tell if the two pages you speak of have the exact same meta description by looking at their source code, which it sounds like you may have already done. If the meta descriptions are not the same, the titles are not the same, and the copy on the two pages is not the same, yet the snippet for both pages in the results for the same search query is the same, then I'd say it's a freaky coincidence that Google happened to slice together the same snippet for two different pages with different meta data and different copy.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Page grader says we are keyword stuffing but we arn't. Page source shows different story.
Hi community! We have just run a page grader for the keyword 'LED Bulbs' on whichledlight.com and it comes up that we are keyword stuffing! However, a brief look at the source for the homepage and there's only 6 times that LED Bulbs pops up. We do have the non plural version of the word 'LED Bulb' on the page 27 times.. do we think that would contribute to the keyword stuffing? Thanks!!
On-Page Optimization | | TrueluxGroup0 -
Site not showing up in Google search since move
Hi, hoping someone might help me with some answer(s) as to why our site no longer shows up in Google search results. Even when we type the full name and city into Google, the site is absent. Our Facebook page, LinkedIn and some backlinks show, but our site is missing. I can no longer find it in Google places. I'm sure I've done something wrong since moving from a static (flash-based) site to Wordpress. But the robots.txt file looks okay to me and the sitemap.xml file is present. Anyway, this is what happens when you ask a network technician handle website design... We know just enough to be dangerous! Here is the site in question: www.newfrontiertechnologies.com located in Shoreline WA. Any advice is much appreciated.
On-Page Optimization | | NFTECH0 -
Why do I have such drastic differences in my ratings?
I work for an e-commerce site that has quite a few categories. Some of these categories rank really well and other don't rank at all. What causes such a drastic difference? I understand that there are a lot of factors in ranking, so I am not asking why am I ranked #1 in some keywords and #2 in others. What I am trying to figure out is why I rank #1 in some keywords and don't rank in the first ten pages in another. The pages and optimization are the same. Why wouldn't it rank at all?
On-Page Optimization | | EcommerceSite0 -
Duplicate Content
Hi I am new to SEO and at the moment looking at warnings from the crawl diagnostics report. When I have looked at the content from the urls given I cant see anything obvious that relates to duplicate content. Whats the best way to find out the problem please?
On-Page Optimization | | Pauline080 -
Google Authorship Problems
Hi, I seem to be having a few problems with getting google authors set up on Wordpress. I've set up my G+ account, put the link to my blog http://appointedd.com/blog/ and then registered it on the yoast plugin. However, I'm not sure it's set up correctly and I can't seem to be able to get it to work. I'm hoping a fine someone here has experience in this as I'm a little flustered. thanks.
On-Page Optimization | | LeahHutcheon0 -
List of Google recognised abbreviations?
Does anyone know of a list/resource of abbreviations recognised by Google? For example does Google recognise w/ as with? Andy
On-Page Optimization | | AndyMacLean0 -
Redirecting a Parked Domain
A client's friend has had a parked domain for over 11 years. He has done nothing with it but throw a couple of ads on it. It has some traffic, most likely from typos: the domain domain is somewhat similar to a leading search engine. But the parked domain has no content, no links, no DA. I can't see the benefit of the redirect. My client might get a little traffic -- but the parked domain has nothing to do with his niche. Am I missing something? Is there any risk involved in the redirect (beyond unqualified traffic that isn't valuable?)
On-Page Optimization | | DanielFreedman0 -
Duplicate Content Question
On the home page of my site I have a read more link that takes you to a different URL with basically the same content, just more of it. Home Page: http://www.opwdecks.com/ Read More Link on Home Page: http://www.opwdecks.com/deckmaintain.htm I think this may be affecting my seo. Any suggestions on what I should do about this? Should I add a canonical to the home page and/or on the other page? Both pages are indexed by google. Thanks for any help or tips.
On-Page Optimization | | opwdecks0