Advice Regarding Lost Ranking Please ...

Lost Ranking

[Mark1234567]

Hi there

We were number 1 for a couple of years for a particular search phrase on Google.

Yesterday however we got knocked off completely.

After investigation, I see a .org site is pointing to our domain. That is, if I type in the .org site's URL into my browser, it comes up with _our_ homepage. That is in turn disrupting the Google ranking for us.

I guess that someone administering that site entered in the wrong IP address for their site?

What can we do?

[doortodoororganics]

You could start by installing the google toolbar with the advanced features and check to see if their pr is higher than your sites.

also, check to see if the pr of your site is higher than 0.

it sounds more intentional than accidental.

[Vadim]

You may be hijacked. It was a huge discussion about this. Just search this group.

The best way seems first ask their webmaster and if it does not help, complain to the their host provider.

[jk3210]

Look for a meta refresh=0 re-direct on their page to your URL. They're sort of hard to catch, but if that's the case, you've been hyjacked.

[Mark1234567]

Thanks all. Turned out it was a dead site that my webhost no longer hosted. He when he stopped hosting the site, it redirected went to our site, perhaps because at one stage he had set up our own .info and .biz sites pointing to our own .com.

Anyway, he and the domain lookup company both deleted it for us.

Brings up an interesting issue though. If someone malicious wanted to stop say "Enterprise IT Solutions" from bringing up IBM as number 1 on a Google search (and in fact wipe them virtually out of Google), all they would have to do is buy a $10 domain name and point the IP to IBM's (assuming IBM was using static IP's).

[walkman]

"If someone malicious wanted to stop say "Enterprise IT Solutions" from bringing up IBM as number 1 on a Google search (and in fact wipe them virtually out of Google), all they would have to do is buy a $10 domain name and point the IP to IBM's (assuming IBM was using static IP's). "
No need to spend $10. Just link to them with a click counting script that uses 302 or meta Refresh.

[doortodoororganics]

no, the ten dollar domain name alone wouldn't do the trick.

[siteseo]

Send an email to webmaster @ google dot com with the subject heading "canonicalpage" giving full details, including domain names, search query, etc.

FWIW, I'm seeing more and more pages that do this get relegated to the supplemental index, so it appears G is *slowly* getting better at finding these hijacks and smacking them down. Emphasis on the word "slowly."

[tictoc]

Sending an email to webmaster @ google.com does not work anymore is there another email with google to send to now?

The form also did not work for me it gave me an error.

[tictoc]

Google has a form at google.com/support

but it does not seem to work if you put in links it gets an error? is there a new email besides webmaster at google?

[tictoc]

I guess no one knows..lol