Dupe content checker - 302's - Page Jacking - Meta Refreshes

You make the call.

[Marcello]

My site, lets call it: www.widget.com, has been in Google for over 5-years, steadily growing year by year to about 85,000 pages including forums and articles achieved, with a PageRank of 6 and 8287 backlinks in Google, No spam, No funny stuff, No special SEO techniques nothing.

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.

[webdude]

Everything I have studied and read on meta refreshes and Google tells me not to use meta refreshes. It is bad practice and could be subject to removal by Google. I always thought that was the case, so I never used them. I can find hundreds of documents supporting this. All of them say that if neccessary, set the refresh rate high or you will be penalized by Google. Just search "google" "meta refresh" and you will see what I mean.

Also, almost all references to meta refresh in google answers say that it is a bad practice to use them. In fact, it was considered a popular spam ploy years ago and was used frequently by spam sites.

Something changed and changed drastically. Now there are many meta refreshes showing up in the SERPs. And if I got the timing right, this started right around the Florida fiasco.

I read all these posts of webmasters losing pages in the SERPs, sudden drops in referrals, etc etc., especially since Florida and I wonder if some of this might be related. I have found several of my sites with this problem. Thankfully, the other sites rank higher then the refreshes, and have stayed that way for some time.

But the site now in question has been REPLACED by a meta refresh. Two weeks ago, my home page ranked #50 for a specific key phrase, as of last Monday, the #50 spot is a link to a different site with a meta refresh to my site. My page is gone.

Pretty neat trick if you ask me. I think it needs to be fixed. Google is now broken and anyone can do this. I wonder how many sites will fall before the G takes notice?

[webdude]

By the way, I just noticed that the link on Google that goes to the meta refresh page is now #5. That should be my site there. The link has been changed to a 302 redirect to this sites home page. I think they are doing a double hop now. A meta refresh to a 302 redirect. I need to investigate some more.

:-(

A confused and totally bummed out WebDude

p.s.

My home page is still gone for all key phrases. It is still in the index though if I search the title. My home page is #1, a sub page of mine is #2. Guess what is #3? You got it! The site with the meta refresh that goes to their home page! And if I do an exact search on the title, my site is #1 and the site with the meta refresh is #2!

ARGGGGGGGGGGGGGG!

[GranPops]

Happened with dramatic effect on one of my sites.
Dropped out of sight, got PR0, and his cache was my page.

Fortunately it was an error on the part of the person who coded his links prog.

On removing all his links the problem went away.

Unfortunately the process took so long, with zero interest on the part of G, that I had abandoned the domain.

On another site which had one page duplicated, my page is now back in the cache, and PR has returned.

[momsbudget]

<If googlebot then finds duplicate content on the net it would regard the older source as authoritative >

<That's what I thought they did till I saw one of my internal pages copied verbatim and the copied page ranking higher than ours in SERPS (the copy does have a higher PR). <sigh> Just sent them a cease and desist.>

That's what I thought as well, but clearly it's not as I've had to send out over 20 C&D's in the past two days for this exact event.

[beren]

This sort of activity has got to be criminal. Why isn't it?

I'm sure it is. We need to get the FBI and other law enforcement agencies interested in this crime.

[webdude]

More Info...

I did a header check on the 302 and got the following. Notice that there is a reference in the 302 for www.theirsite.com to www.anothersite.com.

#1 Server Response: [theirsite.com...]
HTTP Status Code: HTTP/1.1 302 Found
Date: Fri, 10 Sep 2004 15:07:50 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.26 (Unix) PHP/4.3.0 FrontPage/5.0.2.2510
X-Powered-By: PHP/4.3.0
P3P: CP="CAO DSP COR CURa ADMa DEVa OUR IND PHY ONL UNI COM NAV INT DEM PRE" policyref="www.anothersite.com/w3c/p3p.xml"
Location: index.php
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html
Redirect Target: index.php

I did a header check on www.anothersite.com/w3c/p3p.xml and got...

#1 Server Response: [www.anothersite.com...]
HTTP Status Code: HTTP/1.1 302 Found
Date: Fri, 10 Sep 2004 15:08:30 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.27 (Unix) (Red-Hat/Linux) PHP/4.3.8
X-Powered-By: PHP/4.3.8
Location: /
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1
Redirect Target: /

This redirected to the www.anothersite.com main pages and guess what? It is a search optimization company with a very large directory of links split up in Yahoo type fashion complete with search capability and everything.

I randomly checked some of these links and lo and behold, all the links are meta refreshes to the sites listed. Must be several thousands of links here (maybe more, it's hard to tell). All the links on the pages are programmed so on a mouseover, it shows the correct URL in the bottom of the browser (just like normal links would), but the actual links are a php script that goes to a meta refresh page.

Looks like thousands of sites have gotten sucked into this thing.

[Marcello]

To Kales:
No the site is not cloaking, but I think they have added the IP of my (small) country to there htaccess file.
I myself can not load the site in my browser but my friends from abroad can.
The most strange is that I can spider the page with LWP but not with a normal browser.
#########
To Macro:
its not a "throwaway domain" they even run a adsense code on the page "www.foo.net/some-keyword/www-widget-com.html"
and they are premium as the adsense code is this of a primium member
#########
Again To Macro:
"And all you need is a throwaway domain with higher PR than theirs"
No, my page has a PR6 and has been hijacked by a PR3 page
My PR6 index-page (www.widget.com) has completely disappeared out of the Google index and been replaced by a PR3 page named "www.foo1.com/mykeyword/www-widget-com.html" which only contains the Meta-Refresh Tag and a Premium Adsense Code.
########
To Critter:
"assigning a"priority date to pages"
Thats where I think the Google-Bug is, as soon as I change the content of my page, my page becomes the newer page and the hijacker becomes the older page ... so for the duplicate content filter the spammer becomes the oldest page on the net and the updated original page is deleted from the Google-Index (only my theory ... no proove)
########
To Webdude"
"Google tells me not to use meta refreshes"
I think the Googlebot has a bug that can not see a content-refresh of 0-seconds
#########
To Momsbudget:
"would regard the older source as authoritative "
As soon as you update your content on your page, you get a new date, so that the spammer becomes the older source and the original source becomes the younger-source.
#########
To Beren:
"FBI and other law enforcement agencies interested"
What about first Google accepts some feedback an reads (and answers) the emails we are sending them.
Just fix the Google-bot and algo for those matters, their is enough feedback since months about this simple hijacking problem on webmasterworld

[Macro]

No, my page has a PR6 and has been hijacked by a PR3 page

That small comment could have major repercussions. So far it seemed that the meta problem site needed to have a higher PR to achieve this effect. If any PR3 site can take down a big boy are we saying that any joker can remove a PR10 website like .... oh, OK, no names?

[webdude]

Hey Marcello,

Thats where I think the Google-Bug is, as soon as I change the content of my page, my page becomes the newer page and the hijacker becomes the older page ... so for the duplicate content filter the spammer becomes the oldest page on the net and the updated original page is deleted from the Google-Index (only my theory ... no proove)

Come to think about it, I made some major changes to all my pages right before this happened. I was waiting for a crawl to see what the results would be when the site was hijacked.

Funny, I didn't check the #50 link in the SERPs for a few days assuming it was my link. I mean, I would search my key phrase, see the link at #50 and think to myself, "Well, I am still at the same spot I was yesterday." Think of the surprise I got when I rolled over the link and noticed the link going to notmysite.com! And now my page GONE!

[webdude]

The plot thickens! In fact, I would appreciate a sticky from an admin or mod who can tell me what this means. I think I am getting in WAY over my head and I need some very knowledgable people to help me figure out whether or not what I am finding is true.

When I go to the SEO company that has the meta refreshes (the thousands of links) and run the php link through an html checker to get the meta refresh, I am getting a refresh that may be triggering click throughs to a major search engine company. One that might even be listed as a forum on this site.

I need verification of this and whether I am on to something.

I don't want to jeopordize my company or any of my sites, so I need someone with knowledge of word bids, click throughs, etc.

Please, only mods, admins or seniors.

This is getting me scared.