SEOmoz's Q+A section has been a goldmine of eye-opening experiences for the entire staff, and never more so than when we see something so bizarre, so surprising, that it defies explanation. Tonight, we not only got to see one of these fascinating search riddles, we're actually able to share (a rare event, as most domains with specific search problems ask to remain confidential).

Thanks to the generosity of Assaf from Paintyourlife.com, a fun, international site that lets you create custom paintings from photos, we've been given permission to share the perturbingly strange search results below:

The above screenshot shows Google in the #1 position for the search phrase "paintyourlife.com." Not only that, but the sitelinks are displaying, suggesting that Google (the search engine) thinks that "paintyourlife.com" is closely connected enough to be a branded search term referring to Google.com.

Google's not the only one suffering with odd results, though - Yahoo! has some odd ideas about paintyourlife.com as well:


At Yahoo!, searching for "paintyourlife" results in a title and description that comes from the site, but the domain and the referring link will send you to Google.com!

Obviously, we asked Assaf if PaintYourLife.com had recently been re-directed with a 301 or 302 or if some other event like a DNS switch could have caused these issues, but to the best of his knowledge, no such shift had occurred. I suspect that a technical problem of some kind affected the results we see above, but there's nothing like a search for your domain name resulting in Google coming up #1 to make you feel like the search giant's taking over everything lately.

Oh, and big props to Live & Ask for getting all of the queries around PaintYourLife.com showing their domain rather than Google's.

p.s. Here's a link to Archive.org's listings for the domain, none of which would suggest anything out of the ordinary.

BTW - Is it just me, or does the idea of having a painting of your house inside your house conjure up a Monty Burns meets MC Escher theme for anyone else? I think I want one...