Topic:
HubSpot,
Sales Tips
(4 Minute Read)
All great mysteries start with a clue.
This clue was a mystery all of its own. A Lovecraftian abomination, forged in the unfathomable dark through countless eons, its name unutterable by any human larynx. A guttural whisper from the abyss…
Artist's impression of swyBESb에
What on earth are these two odd strings doing in our Webmaster Tools console? The content keywords section generally shows the keywords which occur most frequently on a given website. This is surely some kind of mistake? Or are these strings genuinely appearing on the site? An echo of web development gone awry?
A quick search for “site:www.mydomain.com “swyBESb”” revealed that, this string was very real, at least according to Google, and it had been indexed across most of the site in question. Page after page showed up with endless strings of this ungodly terror.
“swyBESb에swyBESb에swyBESb에swyBESb에swyBESb에swyBESb에”
A cursory check of the page source showed no sign of it. Not only that, closer examination of the cached version of the page in Google’s index showed no signs of the string either. In fact, the snippet included in the SERPs seemed to indicate that the string occurred after the file had ended.
Creepy.
Apparently, we weren't the only ones to suffer from this… affliction. A quick search for the string shows that over a million websites have this. Always just after the end of the page source. Websites of different shapes, sizes and CMSes. No-one is safe!
Sadly, for those of us with overactive imaginations, this isn't some ageless mystery, the unutterable name of an evil leviathan beyond our comprehension, or even something really interesting, like an end of file character ripped right out of the Google index.
To be specific, it is a runtime bug associated with Typekit fontloader plugins. The string “BESbswy” is a completely random string used by the plugin to check if the font has been loaded successfully.
If your website is a victim of the the swyBESb에 bug, here's how to fix it.
Ste likes to mess about with the techie side of SEO. As such his blogs are mainly about SEO or rants about bad web development practice.
