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Normally the site grows at a tempo of 200 to 500 pages a month indexed by Google and others ... but since about 1-week I noticed that my site was loosing about
5,000 to 10,000 pages a week in the Google Index.
At first I simply presumed that this was the unpredictable Google flux, until yesterday, the main index-page from www.widget.com disappeared completely our of the Google index.
The index-page was always in the top-3 position for our main topics, aka keywords.
I tried all the techniques to find my index page, such as: allinurl:, site:, direct link etc ... etc, but the index page has simply vanished from the Google index
As a last resource I took a special chunk of text, which can only belong to my index-page: "company name own name town postcode" (which is a sentence of 9
words), from my index page and searched for this in Google.
My index page did not show up, but instead 2 other pages from other sites showed up as having the this information on their page.
Lets call them:
www.foo1.net and www.foo2.net
Wanting to know what my "company text" was doing on those pages I clicked on:
www.foo1.com/mykeyword/www-widget-com.html
(with mykeyword being my site's main topic)
The page could not load and the message:
"The page cannot be displayed"
was displayed in my browser window
Still wanting to know what was going on, I clicked " Cached" on the Google serps ... AND YES ... there was my index-page as fresh as it could be, updated only yesterday by Google himself (I have a daily date on the page).
Thinking that foo was using a 301 or 302 redirect, I used the "Check Headers Tool" from
webmasterworld only to get a code 200 for my index-page on this other site.
So, foo is using a Meta-redirect ... very fast I made a little robot in perl using LWP and adding a little code that would recognized any kind of redirect.
Fetched the page, but again got a code 200 with no redirects at all.
Thinking the site of foo was up again I tried again to load the page and foo's page with IE, netscape and Opera but always got:
"The page cannot be displayed"
Tried it a couple of times with the same result: LWP can fetch the page but browsers can not load any of the pages from foo's site.
Wanting to know more I typed in Google:
"site:www.foo1.com"
to get a huge load of pages listed, all constructed in the same way, such as:
www.foo1.com/some-important-keyword/www-some-good-site-com.html
Also I found some more of my own best ranking pages in this list and after checking the Google index all of those pages from my site has disappeared from the Google index.
None of all the pages found using "site:www.foo1.com" can be loaded with a browser but they can all be fetched with LWP and all of those pages are cached in their original form in the Google-Cache under the Cache-Link of foo
I have send an email to Google about this and am still waiting for a responds.
As Marcia suggested in #121, "There has to be a reason and a reward for doing something like this," so high traffic sites will be the most likely targets and that probably explains why some sites are effected and not others.
I understand now the difficulty. The offending site is cloaking according to your definition.
The reason and reward? I have thought a lot about that. Right now the reward seems to be that they have sapped my ranking in the SERPs. They have switched the meta refresh that was pointed to my site, to a 302 that is now pointed to ther home page.
One of the key phrases I HAD is now #3 with the link being directed to their home page. My title, mousever description, my homepage when viewing the cached document. Even todays date!
So anyone clicking on the link expecting my site is going to their site.
Another strange thing, and I am a novice here, is in the header of the 302 is a reference to a third site. This site is definitely doing the overture pfc scam. I have had several other sources check this for me.
Now, how this is related? I really don't know. That is what I am trying to find out.
I have contacted the offending site with no response as of yet. I have also contacted their service provider and registrar. No response as of yet. Good luck on this though, the site is located in .nl and the registrar is in .de.
Oh and of course I have contacted google, no response as of yet.
I finally got a respone from the offending site. I don't know, but maybe he is reading this thread. One of the reasons I will not go away.
Anyway...
He swears he is not using any blackhat methods on his site. He claims it is a bug in google. He claims he does no cloaking and that all references to my site have been completely removed from all aspects of his site and code.
Yet when I do a
cache:http://www.widget.com/link.php?id=5932
I get my homepage showing the documant as being retrieved on Sep 16, and the date on my page being Sep 15.
Now I am asking anybody, is this possible? Can this really be a bug in google? Is there any way to really check?
I don't want to start a campaign of reporting this site as blackhat unless I can be sure. It would be a bummer if what he says is true and I try to take him down. His site is listed in yahoo, dmoz, google and probably a lot more search engines besides.
And in the back of my mind is the fact that I get no responses from google on this. I need some advice on this one folks.
Thanks
IF that does NOT happen, it should't be too difficult to set up a few non-cloaked redirects and see how Google handles them.
IF there are no longer any references to your site on his site, and IF Google is working correctly, then the next time google spiders his site, Google SHOULD update their cache.
IF that does NOT happen, it should't be too difficult to set up a few non-cloaked redirects and see how Google handles them.
Okay, I'll buy that. I guess I don't understand why the dates are so recent. Isn't that an indication of either his site or my site being recently crawled? The cache date is yesterday.
Now, after reading everybody's posts, I'm going to reexamine a bunch of other sites that have seemed to drop recently.
Thanks everybody!
MAIA: Patrick, if you are still following this at all, did you check the cache on the pages you unintentionally hijacked?
Yes, I am following this thread - very interesting too. The results I referred to are from Yahoo mostly, and there is no cached page being offered in cases where my script replaces the page it's linking to.
Patrick
Yes, i remember that one now, nothing shady going on. As i recall it was just a misunderstanding, as mille wasn't quite clear on what the problem really was. After reading this and similar threads, it's pretty obvious what the problem was, but it wasn't really obvious back then in October.
Oh, and for readers of that thread, please think twice or more before firing off complaints like i recommended mille to do (this was one of those posts that i have regretted later) - at least try contacting the offending website politely first, that's usually better. In some cases this "thing" is not intentional at all, so the offending webmaster could be totally innocent (really!).
...a few thoughts...
I think this issue is all about SERP quality. To improve SERP quality, some measures has been taken to display non-blank pages (and/or snippets) in a number of cases where blank pages or url-only listings would be displayed previously (frames, redirects, meta, splash-pages, etc.) After all, the searcher will find that it's nice to see your wonderful widgets-page regardless if it's on your domain or not.
This has had some bad sideeffects, but until this mega-thread, the reports have been (relatively) few and relatively scattered. I do believe that the Google people can solve this issue, but i'm not sure if they want to, as there's always a trade off between "the right thing to do", and "the thing that gives the better serps" (here, "better" is not measured in webmaster metrics).
Anyway, it seems that abuse of some of these sideeffects is becoming widespread, so let's hope they decide to do something about it soon. Afaik, they have previously picked up problems from these boards and solved them, but of course this requires that it is really perceived as serious problems, not just the occasional bug. (so.... keep posting :-)
This has had some bad sideeffects, but until this mega-thread, the reports have been (relatively) few and relatively scattered.It's my belief that this is simply because only selected high traffic sites have been hijacked and that highjacker's have remained below the radar until now. It seems 301's, 302s, and meta-refreshes continue to work as they should for millions of sites.
I do believe that the Google people can solve this issueI don't disagree. Google must conform to the HTTP Protocol and handle redirects as it specifies. But, assuming webdude's hijacker is cloaking, Google could simply ban the site based on their anti-cloaking policies. Will they? Time will tell.
Google must conform to the HTTP Protocol and handle redirects as it specifies.
Jesus once said "The Sabbath is made for man and not man for the Sabbath". If following the spirit or intention of HTTP opens a gateway to hell then it is probably not a good thing to do.
It is my experience that most problems have simple solutions, although they may sometimes be unpalatable. In this case, the simple solution is to index the pages that have the content. So if the content moves, a redirection must be placed on the old url to the new. This may not be entirely in keeping with HTTP, but it is clear, simple to understand and makes malicious exploitation of redirects impossible.
It does not require vast amounts of brainpower and hugely complex algos. This is a simple problem with a simple solution. All Google have to do is implement it. Their apparent inability to do so is pitiful.
Kaled.
So anyone clicking on the link expecting my site is going to their site.Another strange thing, and I am a novice here, is in the header of the 302 is a reference to a third site. This site is definitely doing the overture pfc scam. I have had several other sources check this for me.
Now, how this is related? I really don't know. That is what I am trying to find out.
Oh and of course I have contacted google, no response as of yet.
Again, IMHO this is not really a Google matter, and other than sticking with their guidelines to the letter, they're wise to stay out of the middle.
My opinion is that this hijacking business reflects the same kind of mentality as browser hijacking - which ALSO I believe is motivated by profit, namely PPC affiliate income.
I have contacted the offending site with no response as of yet. I have also contacted their service provider and registrar. No response as of yet. Good luck on this though, the site is located in .nl and the registrar is in .de
But Overture is in California. :)
[webmasterworld.com...]
A site uses a redirect URL to link to your site, and due to the issue we've all been discussing, the redirect URL is substituted for your sites main URL within Google.
When looking in Google for your site, you find the title snippet, and the description, and the redirect URL, instead of your own URL.
What I've described is basically what everyone else has spoken about. Here is what I'm curious about though.
The company that was using the redirect URL did not mean to have this happen, and they removed the redirect URL string, and replaced it with a direct link a few weeks ago.
Here is the question. What happens now?
My thinking is that Google will crawl the page that use to have the redirect URL link on it, and now they will find a straightforward link.
Will that mean that the redirect URL link, which is now no longer in place, except within the Google system, will dissappear?
If so, how long should it take before the redirect URL string is gone within Google, and the primary URL back in place, within Google?
If not, then what do you think will happen?
Unfortunately, for Google it seems that URL equals Page
So, that redirect URL is now a non-existing "orphan page", although it has never really been a page, only a link. It will probably turn into a ghost URL (an url-only listing in SEPRS) and be buried in the "supplemental results" collection.
The only way to remove an url from Google is to use their Url removal feature [google.com] .. which, ironically, involves a page that is a dead link itself right now, but i have used it successfully in the past.
Your page will get its url back in ... well, it could actually be two months, but i'm not sure it will take that long.
header("Location: $location",true,301);within a php redirect script and where $location is the destination page? Currently the script is sometimes indexed in place of the destination page - it returned a 302 before I altered it.
