Forum Moderators: open
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.
[webmasterworld.com...]
[google.com...]
Run that through a most header checkers you get a
200 - OK - Successful
request that goes to the correct site.
The header checker I use actually follows the path and records ALL header info along the way. When I run it through this one I get...
#1 Server Response: [google.com...]
HTTP Status Code: HTTP/1.0 302 Found
Cache-Control: private
Location: [widget.com...]
Set-Cookie: PREF=ID=5bcbbd8133e3c10a:TM=1095251202:LM=1095251202:S=YCP_LsM5k7Uv7lZP; expires=Sun, 17-Jan-2038 19:14:07 GMT; path=/; domain=.google.com
Content-Type: text/html
Server: GWS/2.1
Content-Length: 152
Date: Wed, 15 Sep 2004 12:26:42 GMT
Connection: Keep-Alive
Redirect Target: [widget.com...]#2 Server Response: [widget.com...]
HTTP Status Code: HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Wed, 15 Sep 2004 12:26:03 GMT
Server: Apache-AdvancedExtranetServer
Set-Cookie: PHPSESSID=071c5a12a2be547c54596f47aefe7219; path=/
Expires: Thu, 19 Nov 1981 08:52:00 GMT
Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0
Pragma: no-cache
Set-Cookie: PHPSESSID=a8aac90657fd9451e9c89af0b38ac783; path=/
P3P: CP="CURa PSAa PSDa CONi OUR DEL BUS ONL STA DSP IDC COR"
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html
It could be a little more dicier to fix then an algo change. I am sure the the G is aware of the problem and looking at a fix. You might have to wait a crawl or two before you see results though.
I still have had no response from any emails to google.
IMHO what it would take to fix what I believe is the root of the whole problem has nothing to do with Google. What might help is for the PPC companies paying out affiliate income to those acquiring clicks through fraudulent means to be held accountable for not establishing guidelines for their affiliates.
How it is now, the PPC company gets income from the clicks they get, their affiliates get income from the clicks they get by hijacking pages, and none of those parties seems to care as long as they're getting their revenue. It's a win situation for them, they're getting money however it's acquired.
The only losers are the innocent webmasters whose traffic is getting stolen by fraudulent means. It isn't a Google issue any more than browser hijacking for PPC income is a Microsoft issue. It's a PPC affiliate issue, and the rock bottom issue is that the ultimate responsibility lies with the integrity and accountability of the PPC companies themselves.
It may be a dead issue if it's offshore entities being dealt with, but if it can be traced to affiliate ID numbers and it's a company in the U.S., that company needs to be informed in detail. They can't be ignorant enough not to know what's going on, but it can't hurt to make sure they do know - with specifics.
And am now thinking in the direction that a simple Meta-Redirection on another site can not replace an Index-Page and steal its position.
I presume now that the other page(site) is also using some server-site "Black Hat" and "cloaking codes" together with the Meta-Redirect.
I would be thinking in the direction that the site is presenting one version of their page to the Search-Bots, making the Bots caching the Re-directed page instead of the Re-Directing page.
And presenting another version to users/browsers which simply includes the Meta-Redirect ... of course I could be completely wrong.
Also by reading on the Internet I found out that this is not a Google problem alone, it's a general problem with all Search-Engines currently.
I am sure that Google and all the other engines are aware of the problem and are working very hard towards a solution, but Rome was not build in 1 day.
Interesting reading materials here:
301-and-302-redirects [rankforsales.com]
Meta Refresh And Search Engines [netmechanic.com]
I read the link you posted at
[webmasterworld.com...]
I sure am glad that I do not pay for clicks.
The only losers are the innocent webmasters whose traffic is getting stolen by fraudulent means.
On the directories I have found, I am actually thinking of contacting as many sites as I can to inform them of how their pay for clicks are being abused. Might be a daunting task though. There seems to be literally thousands of sites. What a scam these directories have going.
To everyone,
No more stickies please. I am only going to answer mods and seniors. I am NOT going to give specific URLs so don't bother asking. The offending sites are easy enough to find if you know what you are looking for.
If you are a site that is paying for clicks, I would study your logs closely. And any other data that is at your disposal. If you are getting lots of referrals from directory type sites, I would definitely check those sites out. Unfortuantely, I do not know how logs would show a clickthrough using a redirect or meta refresh, but be aware. It could be you are paying for nothing.
I presume now that the other page(site) is also using some server-site "Black Hat" and "cloaking codes" together with the Meta-Redirect.>>
Maybe in some cases. There are webmasters in participating in these threads who have admitted to inintentionally hijacking other site's index pages.
See Rick M's posts:
[webmasterworld.com...]
there is so much more going on here that meets the eye
The only reasonable translation of this into plain English is "The problem is even bigger than any of you think".
My guess is some alien piconites have escaped from Area 51 and, intent on world domination, they are invading cyberspace through fibreoptic cables - and of course they are intent on taking control of Google first.
So it's either an invasion by alien piconites or Google techs have stuffed up. No doubt Google would have us believe that the piconite theory is the more likely of the two.
Kaled.
<?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.
