Google SEO News and Discussion Forum

I do wonder why it took so long though? This is not to be nasty, all credit to them for even bothering to say they had recognised the problem and have made changes.

I will make some guesses, i'd love to know what has actually happened.

- 302's were so deep rooted that they couldn't just make the change due to unpredictable results that might occur. It just a long time to fix.
- "Bigger fish to fry". The problem was not considered that serious.
- The problem mainly effected sites with a 'minor penalty' of some sort so whats the problem anyway.
- Warm fuzzy factor is wearing off so they had to fix it. Negative publicity.
- They didn't know what people were talking about.
- Increased workload, so many people email complaining, they had to look at it even though they didn't think it was particularly interesting. Compounded by more support issues due to people excluding their sites.
- It was spreading with unpleasant results and becoming serious.

Thanks for the reply - I will send a re-inclusion request.

But just to let you know that this has happened to thousands of sites on the web so hopefully a fix will be put in place for all the guys and gals who dont read WebmasterWorld. (I am sure that it is already known at the plex now though)

That isn't what people here were doing. What they were doing was taking down their own page at www.myownsite.com so that it served a 404 error. Then they submitted www.badsite.com/302/redirect.to?url=www.myownsite.com to be removed. Google removed the bad URL from the index without touching the "real site" at all. The page on the real site was then reinstated before a random GoogleBot appeared and saw the 404 on the real site.

Thank so much for your infomation. Looks like I am in the same boat as a lot of others in thinking the url removal tool was the way to beat the 302 hijackings. I did this in Feb and a few in March.

Can you tell me what I should do at this point?

Yeah. Some of us were able to remove a few of the 302s because they redirected to the canonical page (and the owner had control of the robots metatag=noindex required for the removal). But this is very dangerous if you aren't careful. Submitting any version of the canonical page (www.mysite.com or mysite.com) will cause the canonical to be removed. In retrospect, it probably did little good to remove those 302s that way as Google was working on this problem behind the scenes and we were impatient (human nature).

GG thanks for your comments/support this week.

C

I can deal with 90 days but I may be writing from debtor's prison come this summer. Now I'm considering buying another domain name and putting a new homepage there - I'd likely be in the serps again in a week. But this seems like a drastic step for something that has to be simple on Google's side.

On March 22nd my homepage did reappear for a few hours with a March 22 cache date (so I know it is possible).

Cant they just re-crawl the homepages/domains looking for 301s from non-www and accidentilly removed homepages - making sure the canonical url is indexed correctly?

Or is a full re-crawl required.

302 redirects

Dup Content generated by Google

Coverups & mis-directs

Special treatment for certain WW members

Constantly changing (hidden) policies & (hidden) procedures

Piled higher and deeper customer support

This site was always white hat, always clean. I suspect that a spam penalty kicked in because of advertising through GoClick and the fact the site made it into Dmoz in about 4 weeks after birth. (Lots of links quickly).

I have already submited to "canonicalpage" suggested by GG about two months ago. No help. According to the Google directory, my PR has been increasing, not decreasing. I don't get it. Do I send a reinclusion request? Do I just wait it out?

It's weird to see my RSS feeds picked up by other sites sitting at the top on my name search.

&

The Google engineers are tinkering/applying a fix, this all takes time, and we can only be patient.
Patience of course does not pay bills or wages.

I know the adage "never rely on free search engine traffic to build your business" is a good one and we must do everything in our power to use other forms of marketing, but the plain fact is that 80% of internet traffic is generated by free Google search results and if we are honest, many of us are reliant on Google to drive a good proportion of new visitors to our sites. When you are thrown a googly like the Allegra update, it is difficult to be fully prepared for the devastation that follows.

<Do I send a reinclusion request? Do I just wait it out?>

when i do an allinurl:mydomain.com i'm still getting another site (302 redirecting) that shows as theirdomain.com/links.php3?op=visit&lid=24

my domain is nowhere in the URL ...

is there an email i can send this to?

I don't think this is due to a 302 problem.
I know what the problem is since I too had a mishap which lead to the same problem.
I fixed the mistake and traffic resumed less than 30 days later.

When I do either of these searches, allinurl:mysite.com or inurl:mysite.com, I get only 4 results. I am uncertain what this means. I have hundreds of pages. All the internal links on my site include my domain name. When I do site:mysite.com, I get hundreds of pages. ALL my links include my domain name.

Out of these 4 links, 2 are from my site, one is a link from a directory that has my domain name in the URL, and the last does not have any reference to my domain name at all.

I have about 125 incoming links, all have my domain name in them. Should I not be seeing these?

With our site, there seems to be some canonical issues and there are signs that our PR sitewide has dropped like a rock but it's hard to for me to know what is going on exactly since I can't exactly see it through Gbot's eyes.

I used the tool and managed to remove a bunch of 302s. I thought I was helping myself out by removing duplication and taking some of the pleasure away from those who created the malicious 302s to start with. As I said, I was impatient and should have just waited this thing out. The removal tool worked fine for me, but the caveats about forgetting to change the metatag back, or inadvertantly submitting the canonincal page were made explicitly.

I know I was one of the members asked to explain the use and wanted to apologize publicly if anything I said caused others problems.

Nobody have told any, that they should remove //domain or www.domain

I did a mistake in the robots txt, I fogot a single User-agent: googlebot
Disallow: /

1.http://site.com (no desc)
2.http://www.site.com

Is that a sign of duplicate content penalty? I thought so and made the mistake of removing [site.com...] with google removal tool, which also removed the cannonical one.