I just had something happen that I think others here would find equally fascinating/frustrating as I did and hopefully someone could explain what happened a bit better than I can.

I was googling something regarding the Kitty terminal and a clicked a result that seemed to be related to be related to my query (first words in the link title were "Kitty keybindings"). When I click on the link it sends me to a Russian shopping website that has nothing to do with my search[0,1].

I have seen some scam/spam search results in the past that are unrelated to my query, but usually I find through CMD-f that they have a ton of random words, many of which match my query, in the same color as the background of the website and so I figured that's how they tricked Google.

But here is different, in the Google cache[2] of the page there is a totally different html result/url than where I am taken - it is almost entirely filled with SEO keywords, and it is a different URL then clicking on the Google result takes me too.

I assumed there was some redirects along the way but trying to track the requests using online redirect tracking tools like Redirect Detect [3] just yields 404s.

How are these websites able to do this? And how is a company with the resources of Google not able to detect such blatant spam like this? I understand how SEO websites get the top search results when they are topic adjacent - but it baffles me that Google is unable to detect websites that take users to a completely unrelated page.

Original Google Result [0]: https://www.abb-renovation.com/csep/kitty-keybindings.html Website that it actually takes you to [1]: https://shop1.onlinefactory2022.ru/category?name=marcas%20de%20vestidos%20de%20coctel Google cache of result [2]: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:6f6lnaOYGPEJ:https://www.abb-renovation.com/csep/kitty-keybindings.html+&cd=12&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us Redirect site I tried [3]: https://redirectdetective.com/