Why Does This Blurry Pic of My Beach Towel Link to Another Zazzler’s Beach Towel?

[Jadendreamer13]

I was searching Google for my new “personalized tropical fish beach towel,” and a very blurry image appeared on the first page of my search—which says it’s from Zazzle—took me to another Zazzler’s beach towel and shop. I suspected something was wrong because of the use of a blurry image of my towel and the fact that the image title was completely different than my image title.

Can anyone explain how this happened? I’m not accusing the other Zazzler with using a photo of my towel (they are probably also an innocent party), but I think there’s something strange going on here. If Zazzle is using my image, the link should point viewers to my store.

Pic 1 is the blurry image of my towel shown on the google search. Pic 2 is the result of me clicking on the image.

 

 

 

 

 

[KeegansCreation]

That is a weird one and it apparently doesn't have anything to do with that Vacation Vacation Vacation beach towel. I tried to recreate your search. I searched colorful tropical fish personalized beach towel and got an entirely different wrong result. This link which has your beach towel picture links to a non-Zazzle website (Gabriel Angel) and features his coastal stripes, tons of them, and not on beach towels.  Bing and Duck Duck Go were unable to find your towel at all. Is it Zazzle weirdness? Is it Google weirdness. I don't know. Then I repeated the search on Google but added zazzle to the search term. It did not find your towel (since Gabriel Angel got excluded). Hopefully somebody else runs this search on google too (click on Images) to see if they get yet a 3rd wrong link. I find it deeply weird that we both got wrong links but different ones.

[Jadendreamer13]

I asked my daughter for her opinion on this issue (she’s a software developer). She thinks that it might be a Google indexing problem.

[KeegansCreation]

That would explain why you and I got different wrong results. Google must be serving up slightly different results based on search history. I ran that same search on Zazzle and it found your towel just fine. So a Google problem I guess. I'm glad your daughter was able to bring her greater knowledge to this. I was baffled.

[Fiorenzo]

Your daughter is probably right. I also found quite a bunch of my own products linking to other products (of mine) and/or being messed up (wrong/old description, wrong image, etc) while I was Google-checking.

[Jadendreamer13]

Apparently, the owner of GabrielAngelDesign.com is also a Zazzler and Cafe Press shop owner.  It looks like he’s offering up Zazzle designs that he likes as an Affiliate. If you click on a product it takes you to a “Zazzle Powered” shopping cart directly to a Zazzle shop, where you can buy the item.

[ievajen]

Not sure can it be related, but I saw on pinterest mixed up names - titles for zazzle items, I thought it's affiliate glitch

[StinkPad]

i know little about google indexing, but the two key factors here (1. the low res image file & 2. the image title displaying as the actual product destination, not your product) allude to the possibility zazzle was suggesting your beach towel to viewers of this beach towel, and google collected that image file when scraping

it's my understanding that product imagery is saved with names matching the product title, which would explain why the photo still populated into your search search results 

i believe, in a perfect world, this result would have only appeared after clicking "view less relevent results," ..which appears at the bottom of the page, once you've finished scrolling through all the images google wanted you to see. i assume something confused it, considering the link destination doesn't allign with whatever meta/exif data still maintains your product title in it.

but again, i know very little about google indexing, seo, and that whole world, so 100% speculation.