Forum Moderators: open
Anne
What may be visually identical to the browser is often different to the crawler (the source code).
In addition, unless it is extremely successful (SERP's on many keyword/keyphrases across a wide margin) these can remain outside of Google's radar for a very long time, unless reported.
If it is clearly the same thing... submit a spam report to Google.
Looks like they want those top category spots.
And fathom's right, though they look identical there is a difference in page size (24,661 vs. 24,474) so there is a difference in the source code, though it hurts my eyes trying to find it.
Of course, it would be very sketchy if one of us left a partial mirror up for 6 months after a domain name change, let alone three years (or somewhere thereabouts). Must be nice to play in the big leagues.
Jim
I had the same thought. It's not the fault of the topic guide. She's done a lot of hard work putting together a great deal of good information. It's too bad the company is pulling these tricks though.
I can't see reporting to Google as they have got to already know what such a big player on the Internet is doing.
Anne
Of course, they have to know that's it's there and what ThisNewDomain is doing (What's the time frame now? 2 years? 3 years? since they've changed names). Seems like being an "acknowleged expert" allows it.
We used to revel in our three links from them, made us "experts." Now the...
local.whateverco.com/gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?site=http//www.ourdomain.com/ourdirectory/ourpage.htm
...doesn't do a dang thing for us. Can't find a backlnk on any search engine (though there used to be). The guide might think that she or he is throwihg us a bone, but anything after the "?" ain't going to show up anyplace. It's just another call for a popup.
Bottom line: Should Google know it? If they can find and penalize us poor folks "working the SEs," of course they do. Let it slide for the Big Boys? Apparently so.
Just another poor folk trying to make a buck,
Jim
To make matters more complicated, some of the subdomains no longer exist, but they or their pages survive in the Google index more than a year after their disappearance (probably because of outdated DMOZ listings--Google sees the DMOZ listing, goes to the non-existent site, and gets fooled by a redirect).
Anne
Hmmm, looks like somethingelseco.com is no longer in the serps, or at least not in the top pages. This is looking at www2 and www3 in the midst of the current update.
They are, at least for some of the guides' sites. I just searched on one of my major keyphrases--"(city with canals) + travel"--and found a mostly irrelevant page from somethingelseco.com in the #3 spot. (I was #1.) That's probably because of the artificially high PageRank that somethingelseco.com enjoys. (I suspect that its PageRank is the result of massive crosslinking between several hundred subdomains. It can't be due to links from external sites, because many of the subdomains don't have all that many incoming links.)
