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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.
<?php
header("HTTP/1.0 200 OK");
header("Location: $URL");
?>
Try this
Thanks for that, but it didn't work either. $location is what identifies the various URLs, so I need that in "header()" I think.
Anyway I probably missed the point of this thread as it turned out, since it appears to be less about a simple meta-refresh problem than a PPC ripoff. Because I see my redirect script appearing in search engine results, at first I saw it as maybe one and the same issue (WRONG).
if this is the technique for hijacking, what is the actual trigger that causes google to think the hijacker's page is the real one? Is it the fact that the hijacker's page is identical?
Several of the sites doing this hijacking are combining it with cloaking.
Each cached page of their site is a copy of a page on my site.
When you search for items which are on my site, the hijacker shows up in the SERPS. If you go to the cache, it is a copy of my site. If you go to the actual url, it is a site which has a similar topic to my site but no content. It requires you to buy a membership to see the contents of their site, but if you do that, it is actually a hard core porno site.
I pointed this out to webmaster@google.com using GoogleGuy in the subject and the reply stated that I could "go pound sand."
That is not a direct quote but almost.
I then asked them this:
Are you saying that cloaking is now an acceptable practice?
Their response basically said that they have no problem with what this site is doing.
After reading more on the Internet and talking with some expert friends overhere, I have to agree with Brett that:
"there is so much more going on here that meets the eye"
I don't know whether that does or does not exclude the original post itself? ;)
kaled, it could also mean that there are some hidden - and less obvious - agendas behind some of the posts. I wish I was clever enough to know which ones and figure out what those agendas are.
quotations, I feel for you but I thought Google was serious about DMCA issues. Do they not see one here? Also, it is not the case that all cloaking is penalised, AFAIK. Maybe, they're skirting a fine line. It is well known that Google like to do things via algo and automatic systems rather than hand-editing. If that is the case it may well be that they are taking this situation into account while tweaking their systems to catch such culprits automatically.
Here is what I got...
The link now ranks #5 for a good phrase. The link is...
[widget.com...]
This link belongs to a directory that allows you to login and edit your listing. When I found this link, I immediately logged in and deleted it from the offending directory (3 weeks ago). My thinking was that I would sit back and wait for the link to disappear and see if my site came back.
Today, not only did it not disappear, but it actually gained a few spots in the SERPs! When I run...
cache:http://www.widget.com/link.php?id=5932 it shows MY homepage. So what is the deal with that? And the date on the cached file is yesterday and the date on the cached page is the day before! (I date all my pages)
So now I am totally ticked. The original meta refresh is gone. It has now been replaced by a 302 redirect. It ranks where my site should be. The 302 goes to their home page but the cache shows my page. It seems that deleting my link from thier directory did not work.
So what the heck do I do? I suppose I could add my link back into their directory, that way I could at least get some google referrals again (all referrals from the G have now disappeared - gone - nada - zilch).
And to make matters even more irritating, I found another site doing the EXACT SAME THING! I also deleted that link which led to a meta refresh, which is now a 302, which now shows my home page as being cached, yet goes to their home page.
Meanwhile, I have 2 subpages that rank in the 500s. That's it. All other ranking for my site is gone except for these redirects. Two months ago. My site was ranking anywhere from 50 to 10 depending on the phrase. That's all gone but these other links still remain.
Still no response from google.
Would be interesting to see if in that they case they would still favor algorithmic handling (which won't help for a long time) or nuke the site manually
Thanks
