Maia - 9:09 pm on Sep 16, 2004 (gmt 0)

Webdude,

Did you try the googlebot@google.com email address, yet? I read the article from Pandia, and I really don't think Google will tell anybody anything via email after that. They have to be aware of that article. If you search "Spammers hijack web site listings" the article is all over the place, now.

Your situation is almost identical to mine. Except that I couldn't manually remove my link, because it kept giving me an error-so I emailed the webmaster of that site to remove the link and they did. They also made a snide comment about banning my IP from submitting to their directory so I wouldn't have this problem again. I know it isn't the same directory, because they use a different linking structure than the example you posted.

After they removed the link, which actually meant the link now goes to a page on their site which then goes to a 404 error page...they did move up in the SERPS for the search terms I found them in.

Eventually, it did get dropped from those search results, altogether. It took more that a few days, though.

I didn't lose any other pages in Google, just the index page they had redirected to, which at the time was showing my page in the cache. My index page was completely out of Google for a time, but I can find it in there now. Also, during this whole thing Googlebot was only hitting my index page and not crawling further, but today I noticed they did crawl some other pages.

As I stated before, after all this, with the link removed from their directory--if you search on just my domain name, that link they were using now shows up instead of my domain name. Which it didn't do before!

Like you, I am wondering if this is because the link still goes to their site before going to the 404 error page.