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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.
A client's homepage disappeared, I have been trying to figure out why. There is one site that shows up when searching "client's company name" on google, which is a 302 redirect script (.cgi file). Could this be causing the problem, or does it only apply to meta refresh?
does it only apply to meta refresh?In the absence of proof to the contrary, assume that redirect methods other than METAs will also cause this problem.
This problem was first described with META redirects, but scumbags being scumbags, they will have experimented to see what else works.
It is likely that the META redirect is grouped for behavioural purposes with others. It is likely that the fault lies in the behaviour of the group rather than special case code for METAs.
Kaled.
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<script language="Javascript" src="http://theirsite.com/clients/script.aspx?campaignid=2915&websiteid=2237&scriptid=11868&subwebsiteid="></script>
<meta http-equiv='Refresh' content='0; url=http://www.mysite.com/index.html'>
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Both [theirsite.com...] and http://mysite.com are indexed and I can find both in searches, however, only when i click on "If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included." I can find both.
So pretty much the two pages are identical in google.
[edited by: DaveAtIFG at 6:54 pm (utc) on Sep. 11, 2004]
You have been hijacked with the simple:
<meta http-equiv='Refresh' content='0; url=http://www.mysite.com/index.html'> tag on the other sites page.
At one moment Google's duplicate content filter will see that both pages have the same content and your page will get booted out of the Serps - If your page has a good PageRank then this will also go to the other site.
The page could not load and the message:
"The page cannot be displayed"
was displayed in my browser windowStill 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).
Am I missing something? If the page cannot be accessed by regular users then what is the purpose of these pages - simply to get you kicked off?
I think you missed this tag on their page (see the second message in this threat):
<meta name="robots" content="follow, noindex">
Seems the meaning is that the page should not be found.
But Google is a little different than other engines as with "noindex" it still shows the URL and title in the serps but without text-snippets.
The normally not so important hijacking page has now taken over the PR6 from a page and their whole site's ranking is upgraded by this.
Do this with another 100 or 500 high PR-pages sites!
SUGGESTION
If you have no understanding of law, refrain from quoting it.Kaled.
The example you gave has absolutely nothing to do with this thread or situation. There is a BIG difference between owning something and someone giving you traffic for free and then stop giving it.
If some site where to be allowed to sue google then using the same logic i could sue any site that puts up a link to my site and then removes it for whatever reason.
There is a BIG difference between owning something and someone giving you traffic for free and then stop giving it.
Very true. The word "crime" has been used in this thread - wrongly, I believe. This is more about Google rankings than about stealing content.
But seriously, G needs to fix this crack in their algo before it becomes a crater.
What is the easiest way to find out if your site is a victim of this type of activity?
My company's ecommerce site recently lost massive rankings on google, and I would like to find out if this could be the cause.
Thanks! Hope to see some of you at the upcoming conference in Vegas, baby, VEGAS!
If google were to impose a ban on sites that have more than 50% redirects, will it work?
