Should Directories display a Website health Warning!

[robbo]

My new website home page has been replaced and displayed as the Link URL from a click counting,URL re-directing directory.
As I understand it there is basically nothing I can do.It has been re indexed wrongly by Google and assigned to this other company complete with my cache.
I believe I'm lucky.One of the guys here had his PR7, 5 year old web site and all his links taken away overnight in the same way.
Had to start from scratch again.
My point is - no-one appears to be safe from this and if I had a high rolling mature site I would be even more worried- how could I guard against this happening and if it did happen how could I remedy it.
Seems crazy to me,but I havn't read anywhere how to fix it if it happened to you and the best ways to guard against it.

[buckworks]

The same thing happened to one of my pages a while back. It also sometimes happens to merchants who have affiliate programs: someone's affiliate link gets indexed instead of the landing page's real URL.

In my own case I wrote to Google, and also got help from a friend who concocted some .htaccess wizardry that I don't even understand, to make sure that if a spider followed the link from the directory, it would get an error message. The page was indexed properly in the next update.

It's enormously frustrating, but be reassured that it's not a death sentence.

[trillianjedi]

BuckWorks,

Would be really useful to get some info on that wizardary.

I haven't yet suffered this fate, but I do see more and more threads like this on WW.

TJ

[robbo]

Buckworks,
nice to hear you got it sorted.I must say from what I've read most don't seem to have such a happy ending.
I sure would like to know what code would help.
Certainly somethings got to be done at the Search Engines.They seem to be taking the true domains cache and simply assigning it to a blank useless redirected link area in the middle of the Directories site.Your homepage URL thus becomes irrelevant to SE and you could possibly be penalised for spamming,duplicate content.
Anyway until they sort it-does anyone have any guidelines on the best way to protect ourselves

[dirkz]

Any chance that the directory had much more PR than your homepage?

[robbo]

Yes, PR 0 on my site when I linked,although home page was indexed by Google correctly then.
Did a few links to get PR up and site spidered.Both worked,but then I lost home page.
I'm searching through logs and basically getting any redirecting link sites to remove their link to me.The offending site has done this and the URL which was showing as my home site just goes to an error page in this directory site now.
Google still has my correct home page in their list and hopefully it should get picked up again.
robbo