Posted by randfish

It’s been a long time since we had a differential diagnosis post here on SEOmoz, but we’ve been getting lots of comments and emails requesting some mysteries, so here goes:

#1 – Who, Exactly, is Awesome, and Why?

I agree with the sentiment of the second result, Google is an awesome product, but this ranking is very bizarre given the content and links pointing to this page/site. The other engines certainly don’t agree that it belongs anywhere near the top of the SERPs.

#2 – Bing and the Hash

In the past, search engines have been known to ignore the hash in URLs and treat internal anchors as invisible to their link graph. While Bing has done a lot of things right and earned Microsoft some of the best praise they’ve received in years on the search front, treating internal anchors as separate URLs could cause a lot of problems. In this example, it’s a relevancy issue, but in other cases it could seriously screw with canonicalization in the link graph (and force webmasters to re-think their use of the hash in URLs).

#3 - Where are the Cheap Books?

The Half.Ebay.com URL is an odd one to have at the top of these results. Not only is there a much more relevant "books" page at http://books.half.ebay.com, there’s also no mention of the word cheap anywhere here (and precious little anchor text pointing to this page with that term either). It almost makes me wonder if Google’s doing something with synonyms to rank this page here.

OK – now it’s your turn to solve the mysteries above. Please reward valiant efforts and great insight with thumbs up!

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