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.

[Ambient]

The same problem happened to me. A competitor decided to abandon his site and give up his business, and redirected to my site using a 302. Sure enough, my index page was gone from all Google rankings. Still waiting (Google says it can take 6 weeks, relax). The subpages all rank fine.

The problem is obviously a 302 redirect from a lesser site. His site is now rated #5 in a category I have always rated #1.

[Maia]

Sure, Google said relax. When I got my index page back, I had lost my Page Rank. It's still PR0.

I have a change. That freaking other URL has finally disappeared when I do a search on my domain name. However, Google now gives my [my-site].com URL instead of the www.[my-site].com URL.

I don't really understand that, and I have 301 redirects from the non-www pages to the www-pages.

However, the other directory that hijacked me is still in there. So, who knows if they will take over where the other place used to be when searching for my domain name, soon.

I still wonder if I should put a link to that page from mine, but nobody has answered my question, and I don't want to make things worse.

Anyway, that's where I'm at now.

[ashdar]

Maia Is your domain cached by google? I had the same thing initially google only had my domain.com without the www. But this wasn't cached and couldn't be searched with keywords.

When www.mydomain.com re-appeared in google yesterday only then it had a cache (2 days old) of the page and could be searched.

I haven't asked the offending site to remove their link. I'm curious to see if google will fix itself (which it slowly is from the looks of it). I don't think you should put a link to that site though, I don't think it's helpful.

I think the fastest way to get the offending page removed would be to have them point it to a blank page on your or any page on their site. So next time google crawls it'll replace the old cache and the offending page would drop very fast in rankings. I think this is the best solution.

[Maia]

I think the fastest way to get the offending page removed would be to have them point it to a blank page on your or any page on their site. So next time google crawls it'll replace the old cache and the offending page would drop very fast in rankings. I think this is the best solution.

Ashdar, that site used to have a meta refresh and a 302 redirect to my site. They have dropped the meta refresh and changed the link to a 301 redirect, which should be fine, but Google hasn't crawled that page of its directory, yet.

My site is cached, and my index page with the www is in Google, I was only referring to what appears when you search wwww.[my-site].com. That situation had to do with a different directory. My site was hijacked by two different sites simultaneously.

[gemini]

Okay, I'm kinda getting lost here..

I switched to redirect 301 and got rid of metarefresh last week. In addition to that I don't allow to crawl any php files, but I see new cache of offended pages every day, although links don't go to those pages - they go to my internal pages. What is happening? Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks

[ashdar]

Maybe your attempt to dis-allow php is blocking the robot from seeing the 301 re-direct and it's caching whatever it's seeing instead.

I'm not sure why you are trying to dis-allow php pages.

[gemini]

well, it may be not logically, but I was trying to get rid of php pages in the serps.

[ashdar]

I think it would take longer for 'broken' links to get removed from google's cache than re-directing it with a 301 to a page or real destination.

But if you want to remove it I think the fastest way is described here: [google.ca...]

[gemini]

I think I figured it out and I guess I was false alarming. Actually there are no snipets and no cache for the links in the serps when I do [site:mysite.com inurl:link.php?id=], but when I search for the actual mysite.com/link.php?id=123 it gives me snipet of the url I redirect to with the correct url and it's cache. So, I guess as long as there is no actual cache for the link in the serps and other site's snipet we are fine.

[tosho]

In addition, robots do not follow links directly as users do, they record them and visit them later, therefore no referrer data could sensibly exist. Whilst it is possible that some redirects are followed directly (unlike regular links) there would still be no referrer data.

This does raise an interesting point. Previously I have been almost certain that the fault lies in the indexing service, however, if googlebot is following redirects as browsers do (rather than treating them as links) then this might explain a great deal - in fact, it might explain everything.

Kaled, looks like they do follow redirects right away. this is from my access log:

66.249.64.170 - - [06/Oct/2004:00:02:33 -0400] "GET / HTTP/1.0" 301 0 "-" "Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.google.com/bot.html)"
66.249.64.170 - - [06/Oct/2004:00:02:34 -0400] "GET /index.php3 HTTP/1.0" 200 2142 "-" "Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.google.com/bot.html)"

Works as intended in my code, if / is requested, a 301 is pointed to /index.php3, but look at the times of the consecutive requests. same IP, a second later, looks like redirect following to me. No referers though.

[g1smd]

They do also follow new links right away sometimes too.

The cache date for one page of a site is a few seconds before the cache date for another page on a different site that has been linked to from the first mentioned page.

That time difference was noticed the very first time that Google followed that new link, about a week ago. Both pages had been online for many months, and both hadn't been re-cached for many weeks.

[tosho]

sorry for the off topic, but, yeah, they are fast these days. the toolbar is a new content source too. today, I tested a brand new page on my site with ie and toolbar on. No links to the page, no one knows about it. 5 seconds later the page got a googlebot visit. big brother on steroids :)

[kaled]

Now all we need is logs proving that Googlebot behaves the same way with redirects from one domain to another.

Here's a logic suggestion for Google.
1) Treat all redirects from one domain to another as permanent.
2) Always index the target of a permanent redirect.

There are legitimate reasons why temporary redirects should be allowed across domains, and a means of enabling this (at the temporary home) should be provided. This would probably mean introducing a new HTTP header response along the lines of

Temporary-Home-Of: permanent-domain.com

or introducing a new standard file called redirects.txt to hold such information.

Kaled.

[Marcello]

I thought the 302 problem was being solved...
BUT I AM WRONG!

As the redirecting page at "foo.com" had been deleted and my Index-Page at my site started to appear again, I thought that Google had solved the problem of the "Duplicate Content" and "Page Jacking" created by 302 redirects and MetaRefresh tags.

But today 4 new pages appeared in the Serps, each using the MetaTag:
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; url=http://www.widget.com/">

The Cache of the above 4 sites is simply my Index-Page.
They have not taken-over my position in the SERPS,
and can currently only be seen by clicking:
"repeat the search with the omitted results included"

My site has not recuperated 100% yet from the first 302-hijack,
I still dont get any data for "link:widget.com" and for "Similar Pages"

Even I have, when searching in Yahoo, 89,000 backlinks of which many PR4 up to PR6

The new foo's this time are Directory-style sites that use some commercial link-portal script to build their directory
( I do not think that the hijacking is done intentionaly by those sites)

The New Hijacking pages are in the format of:
www.foo1.com/links.php?action=link_id=111
www.foo2.com/redir.asp?link=222
www.foo3.info/get_url.asp?SiteID=333
www.foo4.com/links/click.php?id=444

The 4 above pages show my Index-Page in the SERPS with a Cache-Date of 6-October

So everything is starting over again......
Hopeless....Hopeless...Hopeless!

[div01]

I am also seeing a 'via.php' used in a similar similar fashion as the 'tracker2.php' script.