cloaking or something else?

[colintho]

can you help with this question?

without permission or consent a website has used a "redirect mechanism" to return my website page from their website page X, that has resulted in the google indexing of their page together with google cahe of their page being "exact copy of my page"

accident / intent / who knows / not for me to decide?

what is the name of this practice?

is it cloaking? the websmaster says its not cloaking - so whats this called?

how common is it?

their page has also taken my google search positions (I suppose it would - because its my page!)

EXCEPT - they have now deleted page X, with the page returning their homepage, selling their goods! (the webmaster says it has all been unintentional - would this / does this show intent?)

what are the effects? apart from they sell lots - I sell none

is there any way out of this? google informed

the webmaster concerned has offered me a 33% share of the sales?

any comments please

[ukgimp]

without permission or consent a website has used a "redirect mechanism" to return my website page from their website page X, that has resulted in the Google indexing of their page together with google cahe of their page being "exact copy of my page"

Without seeing the page this sounds like they have called your content in their frame. Sounds very dodgy and is not really ok. If this I what is happening you can use a bit of java that will break the frames of. Do a search here for frame breaking

accident / intent / who knows / not for me to decide?

horse stuff to an accident

how common is it?

Less common I think

the webmaster concerned has offered me a 33% share of the sales?

If it was legit why would they offer you money. If they are using the frame method, just bust them out of it and sod em. If it is another method, get heavy, ask then to cease the practice or you will be in touch via a laywer.

any comments please

Yes, but I cannot write them here, I would get busted by a Mod :)

<added>
Frame Breaking
[webmasterworld.com...]
</added>

[ukgimp]

Have you done a Whois and gotten his ISP. You could contact them and talk of copyright infringement. I have read hear that that can be enough sometimes.

[colintho]

I have all the contact info - made contact etc...

he claims its a mistake / unintentional etc...
claims its the search engines fault....
claims he has not copied any of my site...
he claims the mistake may have been due to his site page X linking to my site homepage with a link "mechanism" that has resulted in "confusing" the search engine lsiting....
his page X, is now redirected to his homepage etc....

I'm just confused + frustrated

[ukgimp]

[nic.uk...]

Report them to nominet.
Take screen shots now whilst still in the Google Cache.
Get as much inormation as possible.

It may get to a point where they dont do it anymore which althougth not full recourse it is a good result.

You could get together with the others who are affected by this fella.

Good luck, hope you get it sorted

[robertito62]

Bust his frame.

He really didn't outrank you because of his hard, sweaty, long hours of work, no? Or is he building a large website engulfing yours?

Lazy webmasters shouldn't piggy-back on someone else's struggle...

It does sound like he is using frame 0. Unless it is a shadow domain, which will be more difficult to handle...

[colintho]

thanks all.

spoke with nominet, will only act on what is on a website "live" not past content

as this other site only offers 1 product - which is about 70% of business

business associates are emailing google "search quality" email address to add weight and numbers to the effort, their ill gained top position is poor quality

as the site comes top / number 1 for a range of products which are not offered from the rogue website

any support appreciated

[Marcia]

colintho, did you check the server header info? Was it a 302 redirect they used by any chance?

[topr8]

i don't think it is a frame issue at all,

there are many examples of google indexing redirect pages which i've found in the last few days.

... of course the twist here is that they have then substituted the redirect to you to a redirect one way or another to themselves. ...

IMO i don't think they have done anything illegal - immoral maybe, not illegal though.

[colintho]

302 not sure - this is beyond my knowledge, read a little about this 301 / 302 can see that it is a redirect instruction from the server side? and if a page is not found - then this could redirect.

I asked his hosting service about the site / account etc...

page ***.htm does'nt exist - he must have deleted this and uses a redirect so that he takes the traffic to his homepage.

they say he has lots of "stuff" in asp.net

beyond my knowledge - just know its clever stuff

other webmasters have looked at / spidered his site / nothing to see

[Marcia]

>there are many examples of google indexing redirect pages which i've found in the last few days.

It looks like in some cases they're indexeding the page with the 302 with the content of the original. I just had that happen with a site that was redirected without my knowledge. Google had both, it was corrected right away, but a couple of others dropped the original.

I have no idea how, I know nothing about it, but a couple of years ago a friend said she knew how to cloak pages using asp.

[robertito62]

Not completely off topic, so if anyone care to comment, I'd appreciate.

We have a guy (affiliate) who no matter what, shows up number 1 in searches for almost all the 30+ websites we operate. This is, our sites but with his affiliate code.

I still do not know how he does it, being that 30+ is a high number to get #1 position in all of them just by inbound links, anchor texts and the standard enchilada.

I am of the opinion he uses some code trick, perhaps even shadow domains. On checking his referrals, all I see are some free sites at Geocities and then the bulk coming from Google searches.