Yesterday while researching for a project, I found a very odd page indexed by Google. I searched for the industrial design software “Autodesk Electrical” and set Google to display 100 results. I then used “Ctrl + F” and entered my website name, to see where I appeared (Good way to check rankings quickly).

Near to the bottom of the list was a page totally unrelated to the software. It was a Villa rentals company “Marbella Villa Rentals” and despite the page not containing anything remotely relevant to software, this Villa Rentals page appeared. Displayed in the search results it had a description field containing Autodesk related text. Weird. So I checked on ODP to see if there was anything odd on there (Google uses ODP data as a description source sometimes) and the site didn’t have an entry. Maybe there was a mismatch when Google looked at the ODP description data and somehow applied an Autodesk description to a site in the Villa rentals area. Very strange. Here is the screenshot. This also shows that the Villa page has no text related to Autodesk.

Odd search results page

Maybe Google was testing something, the page has now vanished from the SERPs last time I checked, but I assure you this isn’t some crazy photoshop’d hoax. Otherwise I wouldn’t be compelled to write about it, and I’d think of something far crazier like Lolcats outrank Compare The Meerkat for “car insurance”

I know how these things work though, so I did some screenshots for you to see. Any ideas what was going on here? Is Google doing some testing or is this a weird little mistake?