Is anyone else seeing this?

jawn_tech · #1 (**permalink**) 10-18-2004, 10:37 AM

Someone please try this, I just want to make sure I'm not dreaming.

Google the word "endspan".

What the...huh?

This morning I was just looking for articles regarding webbot tags, and tried that word just for the sake of it.

Tags where titles used to be in SERPs. My goodness, what are they doing with the algo.

pne · #2 (**permalink**) 10-18-2004, 10:41 AM

Weird, weird, weird....

jawn_tech · #3 (**permalink**) 10-18-2004, 11:37 AM

I tried it also in MSN's prototype test search.

It's handles it differently, but not better. None of the sites are relevant, but at least the titles are intact. The content does not contain "endspan", but the code does and it is showing the code in the site description on SERPs.

buddhu · #4 (**permalink**) 10-18-2004, 12:04 PM

Yipe... Yahoo shows code in the description too.

Of the sites that Google returns, if you click through to a lot of them an opening angle bracket renders at the top of the page...

Actually, try the same thing with startspan instead of endspan...

Oy vey.

DriWashSolutions · #5 (**permalink**) 10-18-2004, 01:06 PM

Of the sites that I clicked through, "endspan" acutally appears on the page - due to a coding error on that page.

flood6 · #6 (**permalink**) 10-18-2004, 01:12 PM

EDIT: DriWash beat me to it...

Many of the sites in the G SERPs (I didn't look elsewhere) are sites created with FrontPage 3.0 & 4.0. There appears to have been some bug where there was a HTML comment in the title tag which contained "endspan". There is also an extra "<".

Not being a FrontPage user, I don't know if this is Microsoft's fault or the end user's.

jawn_tech · #7 (**permalink**) 10-18-2004, 01:18 PM

I saw that to be the case on 2 of them (on-page errors with "endspan"), but most did not seem to have an occurance of the word on the page.

[edit: I too noticed the "<" as it appears on the top left of each page]

I see the phenomenon is caused by an error, both on the sites' side, but also on the SE side as it is listing it in descriptions and titles. Obviously, these sites aren't really relevant to "startspan" or "endspan".

An alarm this rings with me is the potential of this type of 'error' being intentionally used in other cases as spam. While the goal is always to use code correctly to achieve better SERP results, someone could actually use incorrect code to their advantage, simulating an instance like this one.

Maximilian · #8 (**permalink**) 10-18-2004, 05:02 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by jawn_tech

Google the word "endspan".

This is the first time I've seen breast implant info, next to a 6th grade school project in a search query - LOL!

Cheers!
Max

bhartzer · #9 (**permalink**) 10-18-2004, 05:14 PM

Actually, it's an interesting find. That word is not competitive, and I hardly think anyone actually optimized their page for that term. And I would gather that there aren't many people who have link text that contain the term endspan going to their page.

That said, it's obvious to me that Google's algorithm might favord keywords that are in the title tag or the header area.

tcampione · #10 (**permalink**) 10-18-2004, 05:36 PM

There's an opening 'title' tag between the startspan and endspan comments, which is apparently an FP bug. A few lines later, the document's *real* title tag begins and ends.

Google is seeing the first 'erroneous' title tag, ignoring the second opening title tag, and seeing the closing tag.

So technically, Goolge is correctly identifying the document's title, albeit a literal html interpretation.

/*tom*/

jawn_tech · #11 (**permalink**) 10-18-2004, 06:40 PM

Quote:

Not being a FrontPage user, I don't know if this is Microsoft's fault or the end user's.

I'm not a user of FP either. I believe FP allows users to edit source code much like GoLive, I think...

I'm going to give this more research, based on a funny feeling I've got. Anyway, it does seem interesting to see how SE's see our pages, from another perspective.

stevealmond · #12 (**permalink**) 10-18-2004, 10:00 PM

I've had a quick look at google's cached version of the top ten results for 'endspan', also I have been and had a look at the source code of the sites concerned. Some of the sites are there because they provide html coding help and tuition, so no problem with these. The others are all there because of coding errors in the html, e.g.

<head><<title>

<title></title>
</head>

What's any SE going to make of that! Or;

</td></tr></table></body>

</html> bot="HTMLMarkup" endspan bot="HTMLMarkup" endspan bot="HTMLMarkup" endspan bot="HTMLMarkup" endspan bot="HTMLMarkup" endspan bot="HTMLMarkup" endspan bot="HTMLMarkup" endspan bot="HTMLMarkup" endspan bot="HTMLMarkup" endspan bot="HTMLMarkup" endspan bot="HTMLMarkup" endspan bot="HTMLMarkup" endspan bot="HTMLMarkup" endspan bot="HTMLMarkup" endspan bot="HTMLMarkup" endspan bot="HTMLMarkup" endspan bot="HTMLMarkup" endspan bot="HTMLMarkup" endspan bot="HTMLMarkup" endspan bot="HTMLMarkup" endspan bot="HTMLMarkup" endspan bot="HTMLMarkup" endspan bot="HTMLMarkup" endspan bot="HTMLMarkup" endspan bot="HTMLMarkup" endspan bot="HTMLMarkup" endspan bot="HTMLMarkup" endspan bot="HTMLMarkup" endspan bot="HTMLMarkup" endspan bot="HTMLMarkup" endspan bot="HTMLMarkup" endspan bot="HTMLMarkup" endspan bot="HTMLMarkup" endspan bot="HTMLMarkup" endspan bot="HTMLMarkup" endspan bot="HTMLMarkup" endspan bot="HTMLMarkup" endspan bot="HTMLMarkup" endspan bot="HTMLMarkup" endspan bot="HTMLMarkup" endspan bot="HTMLMarkup" endspan bot="HTMLMarkup" endspan bot="HTMLMarkup" endspan bot="HTMLMarkup" endspan bot="HTMLMarkup" endspan bot="HTMLMarkup" endspan bot="HTMLMarkup" endspan bot="HTMLMarkup" endspan bot="HTMLMarkup" endspan bot="HTMLMarkup" endspan bot="HTMLMarkup" endspan bot="HTMLMarkup" endspan bot="HTMLMarkup" endspan bot="HTMLMarkup" endspan bot="HTMLMarkup" endspan bot="HTMLMarkup" endspan bot="HTMLMarkup" endspan bot="HTMLMarkup" endspan bot="HTMLMarkup" endspan bot="HTMLMarkup" endspan bot="HTMLMarkup" endspan bot="HTMLMarkup" endspan bot="HTMLMarkup" endspan bot="HTMLMarkup" endspan bot="HTMLMarkup" endspan bot="HTMLMarkup" endspan

Please tell me what that is all about!

For some of the others google says that the term 'endspan' only apears in links pointing to that site. So the explanation here is a badly coded backlink to the site.

Regards

Steve

colr · #13 (**permalink**) 10-19-2004, 06:13 AM

When these people check their web stats and see the most popular searched term was "endspan", lol!!!

sfowler · #14 (**permalink**) 10-19-2004, 06:50 AM

I kept getting hits on "Rohleder" (which means untanned leather), nothing to do with gas analysis at all. I went crazy looking for it and finally found that it was buried in a list of Chines and German references. Obviously the leather industry is not very active online!

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