obono - 11:42 pm on Sep 25, 2006 (gmt 0)

Last year, some of my subdomains went poof. After some analysis, I noticed google indexed them as www.subd.domain.com.

Fixed the .htaccess and closed the loops. Then tried to push bots to understand that xyz.subds.domain.com was actually subds.domain.com. It worked for a while, but the second set of urls kept coming back and the subdomains disappearing or getting listed as URLs only. Problems kept mounting throughout this year and the whole domain was deindexed last month.

At first, I thought that this had been a Googlebot mistake trying to determine the right canonical but last week -after digging deep-, I finally found the suspected links pointing to my site as www.subds.domain.com/ in several different forums. It took to recreate the site as domain+folders and checking the error logs for several weeks until I saw the hits coming. Maybe I was just lucky as a malicious webmaster would "link and run", leaving no smoking gun. This is where suplementals would shine.

Could this be conclusive proof that other webmasters -intentionally or not- can harm you?