Hi there,
This has been happening to me a lot recently, and it is very
frustrating. There are a few reasons, which I have listed in order of
likelihood:
1. The page has changed. Search engines rely on the content which
existed when they last visited the page, which could be one month ago.
This is what they base their results on. Google includes a link in
their search results to the cached copy of the page - this is what it
looked like when they last visited, and this is what the results are
based on.
2. Links and META tags. Although the text present on the page is by
far the most important factor, search engines can use other
information to help create a good search result. One, which you have
mentioned, is the words in a link which point to the page. The other
is the META description and keyword tags. Google ignores the keyword
tag, due to abuse by web site designers. Some other search engines
still use it, because it is a great place to put misspellings of
words, or appropriate keywords that for some reason do not fit into
the visible text of the page.
3. Invisible text and cloaking. Some web site owners will cheat to get
you to visit their page. They usually stand out, because as well as
cheating, their pages are very long, lacking images (except banner
ads) and use lots of different text sizes, colors and fonts. Invisible
text is text which is in the same, or almost the same, color as the
background. It typically appears at the bottom of the page, in the
smallest possible text size. To see it, just left click and drag your
mouse over the area.
Cloaking is done by intercepting page requests and checking who is
looking at their web page. If it is one of the search engine robots
(like Googlebot), they redirect it to a different page, that has been
designed for them alone to look at. A regular visitor sees the
ordinary page, which will quite likely contain very different content.
Search engines rely on human tip-offs to catch webmasters who do this.
The web sites concerned are typically of a higher standard than those
who use invisible text.
4. Glitch. Search engines, like any software (especially Microsoft),
make the occasional mistake. We have had search engine problem queries
here that do not seem to have any logical basis, and a software glitch
seems to be the reason. This from Google's help pages:
A technical glitch on our side may have caused us to 'miss' your site.
://www.google.com/webmasters/2.html
TIP: If you use the "find" function regularly, you might want to try
out the Google Toolbar. It has a more convenient way to find the
searched for words on a page, and can also highlight them.
http://toolbar.google.com/
And remember to look at Google's cached pages. Not only do they
contain an exact copy of how the page looked when Google indexed it,
they often load much quicker, and the keywords are automatically
highlighted.
Search strategy: Years of enjoyable web searching, with occasional
moments of
frustration.
Best wishes,
robertskelton-ga |
