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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.
Is there any way to see the cloaked page?
curl -i -A "Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html)" [widget.com...]
(if you have a Unix compatible box and the cloaking is UA based)
Otherwise, you can fiddle around with the UA of your favorite browser (if it's not IE).
There are two basic approaches to cloaking, one is user-agent based and easily circumvented, the second is IP based and is extremely difficult to penetrate. I'm confident you would need to visit this hijacker site using a googlebot IP to penetrate the cloak. (High quality cloaks often rely on BOTH IP and user-agent checks.)
Google's cache of a page displays exactly what googlebot saw when they spidered the site. If a hijacked site appears in Google's cache, rest assured that cloaking is involved in this hijack. When googlebot visited, probably identified by IP address and possibly confirmed by user-agent, it was served your URL.
Typically, a site using cloaking to serve their own pages (not a hijacker, a simple cloaker) will include a "nocache" metatag on their cloaked pages, to avoid having those pages cached and possibly reveal their cloaking. Since a hijacker is hijacking/cloaking your site, the hijacker cannot add a nocache metatag to your site without hacking into it.
Page jacking has been going on for many years, this is simply a more advanced technique. Is it Google's responsibility to fix it? Not necessarily. But Google's webmaster guidelines are very clearly against cloaking.
There have been similar reports in the Yahoo forum suggesting redirects cause problems. It reportedly effects some sites and not others. I suspect many of these reports are also related to this page jacking trick. And Yahoo webmaster guidelines mirror Google's regarding cloaking.
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.
Because, my site did appear in the cache, but the page was redirecting to my index page. Once they removed the link to me, my page still appeared in the cache, but the page was cached before the link was removed.
Patrick, if you are still following this at all, did you check the cache on the pages you unintentionally hijacked?
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!
