Forum Moderators: open
I've had a personal web site for several years.
Its main index and a couple of pages got up to PR6.
Some time ago I registered a domain name and put a
dummy page with a unique keyword and linked to it.
Google picked the page and it tops the list (of 1)
for that keyword.
One of my PR6 pages become irrelevant long time ago,
and I replaced it with a polite request to change
the back-links and a link to main index. But there
still is a bunch of links to it.
So I was experimenting with the ways to reuse this PR6.
Last thing I did was adding this to PR6 page:
<META ... Refresh ... "1;url=www.mydomain.net">
The next day google picked PR6 and showed for it
the description and cache from www.mydomain.net,
and the bizzare thing is that when I search for
my keyword it shows *ONLY* my PR6 page address.
www.mydomain.net is gone from www.google.com
After some poking around I found that both pages
will show up on www-cw search with filter=0
Also, searching for another keyword combination from
www.mydomain.net shows PR6 on top of ~80 results
and mydomain (PR0) shows up only on the second page
only with www-cw &filter=0
And it have been like that for last few days.
It doesn't like good, because it means that there
is some algorithm in freashbot that somebody could
knock a page off the main search from unrelated page.
Any thoughts?
[edited by: Mikhail_At_Home at 7:43 am (utc) on Sep. 11, 2003]
[google.com...] - Quality Guideline #2
Furthermore, a meta-refresh results in a 302-Moved Temporarily redirect, so Google will neither udpate the URL, nor confer the original page's PR on the target page.
Use either a server redirect or a scripted redirect, with a response of 301-Moved Permanently.
Do not expect stable results until after about 30 days.
Jim
I understand that this is a sneaky practice and somebody
got to be punished. However, it seems to be strange that
Google choose to punish www.mydomain.net owner.
Supposingly a guy at www.mydomain.net with a modest PR3
has no idea that somebody used PR6 page to trick Google
into removing his index.
Now if PR6 page was somehow cloacked people will click on
it and will not be redirected to www.mydomain.net but get
comletely different page. This steals www.mydomain.net
reputation. Reputation doesn't always result in a higher PR.
Mikhail
...because it means that there is some algorithm in freashbot that somebody could knock a page off the main search from unrelated page.
I observed something similar from a banner ad redirect page, and posted here:
Banner ad redirect-page indexed as mirror site by Google
[webmasterworld.com...]
I wasn't happy that this could happen on Google. Fortunately, I was able to get a noindex, nofollow meta robots tag added to the redirect page, and also to chat with a Google search engineer who thought, in fact, that this behavior might be "a bug."
The mirror page disappeared after a couple of weeks, and I thought Google had solved the problem.
It's disturbing to see it's still happening. You're right... in your case, while, as you admit, it's "a sneaky practice" and you did it to yourself, it nevertheless shouldn't be happening. It makes all sorts of sites vulnerable.
the best solution i can think of is to use a 301 redirect
Redirecting very many domains into one domain can also lead to problems. See WebGuerrilla's post (msg #17) in this thread...
Pointing multiple domain names to main site without mirrors
[webmasterworld.com...]
Recently, an unamed search engine empolyee was looking through my domain registrations and noticed I owned about 40 similar domains. When these domains were typed in, the all resolved to a single site. (using the method listed above).That led to the employee telling me that if I didn't stop putting up duplicate sites, he'd have to take action. After explaining that these additional domains where used for print ads and general type-in traffic, and that they weren't actually sites and I didn't ever promote any of the other domains on the web,he seemed o.k. with it, but he did say that in a case like that, they would prefer the domains were on separate sites that had robots.txt exclusions set up.
I think the concern is that in a link analysis system, a 301 from a domain that existed at one time ultimately passes some rank to the new location. That being the case, there is the possibility to be abusive if you intentionally register 100's of expired domains and 301 them all to a single location.
That's not what I was doing and I don't think that is the intent of most sites that use a similar system, but the experience definitely got me thinking more about how stuff may look.
Probably one (of several) reasons for Google's canceling backlinks on expired domains. See the rest of the thread for a discussion of a bunch of issues.
Thank you, guys, for pointing to 301 redirect.
I don't have any controls on my isp's IIS/4.0 server or at least I tried first to do everything inside html before learning how to use .htaccess or whatever controls 301. (My ignorance there is great).
My main goals is to move from my isp and, most important, how to get people who link to me change their links to www.mydomain.net. So I would rather have a page that waits for 30 seconds and begs them to change the links before going to the content of the new site.
But what got me to start this thread was disapperance of www.mydomain.net from the index. Let me summarise what I know after the latest fresh crawl results appeared today.
I have a site at users.isp.com/~myname that has several PR6 pages.
I also have a www.mydomain.net (PR0) that points with frames to a free space at tripod. It doesn't have any content, but a unique keyword and was linked once from my home page. Just long enough to get into index. I am not aware of any inboud links to mydomain.net. Search for TheKeyword was finding only my page for the last few month.
On Sept 7 I uploaded a PR6 page with <META ... HTTP-EQUIV ... Refresh "1;url=www.mydomain.net">
On Sept 9 morning I searched for TheKeyword and both addresses showed up with the content of mydomain.net. A few minutes later same search turned up only PR6 address with content of mydomain.net in the description and in the cache, but the name of cache entry was www.mydomain.net.
By the end of the day I figured out that runnig TheKeyword query on www-cw and www-fi &filter=0 gives me both addresses: mydomain.net and users.isp.com/~myname/PR6. While all other datacenters give my only one result: users.isp.com/~myname/PR6.
I changed refresh redirection to a completly different location with much higher PR8.
On Sept 11, as the next fresh crawl results was coming online, I could see users.isp.com/~myname/PR6 dropping from the google datacenters one by one both from TheKeyword query and from the site:users.isp.com myname lookup.
Since yesterday and as of today after another fresh crawl users.isp.com/~myname/PR6 is missing from the index completely (which it deserves). And it's potential PR8 target prospers.
But www.mydomain.com still could be found by TheKeyword and "mydomain net" queries only at www-cw and www-fi. However, it does show up for "www.mydomain.com" query in the cache of all google datacenters.
The bottom line is: what if www.mydomain.net owner wasn't me but some poor guy who enjoied his "top ranking" on TheKeyword up until Sept 9 and now has absolutly no idea what happened to his page?
I will try to resurrect PR6 into google index and than target one of my PR1 pages with a couple of backlinks on yet another free hosting.
These little oddities give out whole lot of of information about google inner-workings, I just don't understend how to make sence of the data that I got.
Mikhail.
