offsite 301 being cached as onsite content

[littleman]

Checking out some of my links I came across a 301 link that was cached as content of the site pointing to it.

sideways look at google...
Imagine if this is happening all over the index? That could be why the PR woes and fallbacks are happening.

[windows22]

Littleman,

My mainwebsite has alot of domains not in use redirected to keep the "type inn" traffic.
To my surprise I found 5 exact copies of my index page in the new google update
my real website and 4 redirected domains (godaddy).

My index page has dropped like a stone, google seems to ignore it completely.

Does google give out penalties for "duplicate content"?
could this be the reason for My "semi penalty". Google now belive I'm a copycat?

Another "bug" i see in the new update:

One of the subdomains are included twice as:
mydomain.com/dir
mydomain.com/dir/

[littleman]

>mydomain.com/dir
>mydomain.com/dir/

That actually would be the same bug. Most servers do a 301 redirect in that situation.

[Brett_Tabke]

Remember when Inktomi used to do this (97-2001)? I ran domain after domain off of nothing but 301 redirects. I was a seriously hurting unit when they finally fixed it in 2001.

[tschild]

Somewhat related to this:

My personal home page used to be at www.$lastname.net, linked under that domain in ODP, Google dir., etc. PR was 7, occasionally 8.

On 18 April I changed this to $firstname.$lastname.net (as a preparation for sharing the domain with my brother at some later time). I installed a 301 redirect from www.$lastname.net to $firstname.$lastname.net . The Open Directory homepage listing was updated shortly after.

After about one week the new domain appeared as #1 when googling for "firstname lastname".

After Dominic update:
- PR of $firstname.$lastname.net is 0
- Googling for "firstname lastname" returns the obsolete www.$lastname.net as #1 (with text snippet and cached version reflecting the pre-18 April page) and $firstname.$lastname.net as #2
- Google Directory still has the old URL in the personal homepages for my site (understandable, as the last ODP RDF versions were 9 April, 24 April and 18 May). The Google Directory category page reflects a fairly high PR for that old URL.

To confuse the matter still more: Freshbot visits the new URL often and followed a new link to a new site of mine within 1.5 days - it behaves like with a high PR page not a PR0 page.

I just hope this means I made the change at an unfortunate time, not that there is a problem with the 301 redirect.

[jdMorgan]

littleman,

> a 301 link that was cached as content of the site pointing to it.

How was this redirect implemented? A server redirect would have no "content" to cache, so it's confusing to me.

Thanks,
Jim

[littleman]

jdMorgan, I'm glad you asked. I assumed it was a genuine 301 at the server level like:
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Connection: close
Date: Tue, 27 May 2003 17:25:07 GMT
Location: location.com

But I was mistaken, what it really is is a meta refresh:
<meta http-equiv="Refresh" content="0; URL=http://www.domain.com"></meta>
Which is even more interesting.

To clarify, the page that has the redirect ( or meta refresh in this case) has the content of the page it points to in it's cache.

Yet there is windows22's case:
>mydomain.com/dir
>mydomain.com/dir/
Which is definitely a 301. So, it looks like the bug can happen from more than one form of redirect.

Windows22, there seems to be a penalty for this page, it is reasonable to believe that google is seeing these pages as exact mirrors which can be causing a penalty.

[creative craig]

Would the same happen with a redirect of a javascript nature?

<script language="JavaScript">
<!--
window.location.replace("http://...")
//-->
</script>

Craig

[misja]

I've got the same problem as littleman, years ago I redirected old pages with meta refresh tags to the new homepage and now some of them are showing again in Google.

I've changed some of them to 301 redirects for Google but another problem is that AllTheWeb is doing exactly the opposite. meta refresh tags are handled correctly but 301 redirects do not work.

[littleman]

creative craig, odds are you are okay.

I have yet another meta refresh which's cache appears to be my index page.

For those who are interested, if I do a search for a string on the index page one of the meta refresh pages comes in place of my actual page, and my index page is relegated to the "repeat the search with omitted results included." section

I'm inferring that they are giving the credit for the perceived content of the page to the site that has the highest PR, and penalizing the other (original in this case) as a site with duplicate content.

Quite a nasty bug.

[ogletree]

I just found one of my old links that I put a 301 direct to and the place it redirects to is cached. The URL is domain.com/subject/ There is nothing there except a redirect. The cache is from Tuesday April 22. I come up number 1 on the serps for my keyword for that page. Actually right now if I do site:www.domain.com I get 28 links to my old pages from a 2 month ago crawl. I made sure each one there had a 301 direct because they were still coming up n the serps. None of my new site structure is in there. There were about 4 results a few weeks ago with the new site structure but they are gone now.

[creative craig]

I read in an old thread that Tedster puts his .js redirect in an external file and then calls it that way, so a un-educated spider wont think that there is any funny business going on.

Thats what I am thinking of doing :)

Craig

[jpalmer]

Greetings and gidday from downunder all,

have a similar problem with google, which somehow began to appear in Fast DB as well, last year after a host server upgrade.

Misja, contact the folks at alltheweb/fast directly by email or via their feedback form, detailing preferred url and obsolete url/address for deletion.

They fixed my urls in their databases very quickly, and even included the (short) log request in their reply email to prove it.

Google on the other hand has continued to perpetrate the wrong url, and as I'm not a sysadmin, and don't have root access to my IIS server, I just have to put up with it appearing in results and referrals.

(No! Please don't suggest I learn asp and change all my file extensions!)

Either they'll wake up one day, or I'll find a dup. penalty slapped on me.

hopefully either way, it'll get fixed .... eventually.

Cheers
JP