Question

I have a weird problem on a website. Everything works OK when someone visits the site directly, but if a visitor enters the website from Google search or Bing the homepage looks very bad. I noticed this problem on Firefox, Chrome and Safari (latest versions).

First I though this was a Google cache problem and next time the crawler will visit the homepage it will also update the cached webpage.

But when I saw the same thing happening for visitors coming from Bing I started to think that this isn’t search engine related and that it’s something I’ve done wrong when I’ve coded the website.

This is how the homepage should look like: http://melisayavas.com/

And from Google or Bing: https://www.google.com/search?q=melisayavas

Does anyone know what or were the problem is?

Answer 1

Your site is broken in Google Chrome 18. I suggest you fix it using this browser first, this might fix more issues related to search engine.

EDIT

I just saw your screenshot and it is exactly what I see in Chrome.

EDIT 2

I might be complete wrong, but when I click the link from the initial post http://melisayavas.com/ the site is broken. If reload the page it is also broken. If I go to the URL bar of the browser and hit ‘enter’ the site is fine.
I think the site is broken if the client sends a Referer header…

EDIT 3

I did a few tests with curl confirming my results. This test will results in the expected result:

$ch = curl_init('http://www.melisayavas.com/');
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_REFERER, 'http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10182482/homepage-not-rendered-correctly-for-visitors-coming-from-google-bing/10182607#comment13069478_10182607');
$data = curl_exec($ch);
echo $data;

This on will result in a broken site:

$ch = curl_init('http://www.melisayavas.com/');
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, TRUE);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_REFERER, 'http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10182482/homepage-not-rendered-correctly-for-visitors-coming-from-google-bing/10182607#comment13069478_10182607');
$data = curl_exec($ch);
echo $data;

Having a referer in your request is what breaks the site. Do you have any part of your source code conditional to the referring url?

** EDIT 4 **

There is one piece of HTML code that is added when it’s coming from a referring url:

<!-- Highlight Search Terms 0.7 ( RavanH - http://4visions.nl/en/wordpress-plugins/highlight-search-terms/ ) -->
<script type="text/javascript">
var hlst_query = new Array("http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10182482/homepage-not-rendered-correctly-for-visitors-coming-from-google-bing/10182607#comment13069478_10182607");
var hlst_areas = new Array("div.hentry","#content","#main","div.content","#middle","#container","#wrapper","article");
</script>

I’m not familiar with WordPress, be I believe this must come from a plugin called Highlight Search Terms, disabling it should fix your site.