How many MIA sites are there?

Are you #15 when you search for your company name?

[Whoa]

Misery loves company, so I'd love to hear that my site is not the only MIA site. How many others are there?

By MIA, I mean that your site is x.com, x is a unique name, and yet when you search for x, you find all kinds of weird sites above you (sites that link to you or mention you) and your site is way down in the results.

I believe Walkman and Chico Loco are similarly afflicted. Are there others?

If so, perhaps we can figure out what we've done wrong (or what wrong has been done to us). I can't for the life of me think of a single thing that would warrant the mistreatment.

I realize there are multiple threads on Allegra, but I'd love to start one that is exclusively dedicated to those who are still in the index but you can no longer find your site. It used to be #1 and now it's say #15.

Just to be clear, if you've been dropped completely from google, this isn't your thread. If you used to be #1 on "blue widgets" and now you're #50, this is not your thread.

This thread is exclusively for the MIA, the forgotten-souls who have been relegated to the Outer Siberia of the Google Index where even those who know and love you cannot find you.

[eyezshine]

If the hijackers are causing a duplicate penalty then the only thing to do is make all your pages work so that this can't happen.

By adding some kind of constantly changing content on your pages you make it so that even though google spiders your page through the hijacker URL your page will be different when googlebot spiders your actual page.

This is the only thing I could find that will stop the duplicate penalty being caused by the hijacker urls.

Another problem is caused by the domain.com <->www.domain.com problem. Which is easily fixed and works great and has brought back one of my sites that was completely banned from google within just a month of redirecting the non www to the www.domain.com

I think google turned up the duplicate filter knob a little high and now we're seeing all kinds of problems. This also helps them knock down the number of DMOZ directory clones that are out there.

I was searching for DMOZ cloans and the only ones that are left are ones that have extreme differences in the original DMOZ. Even the Google directory clone is way different from the original DMOZ and that is why it's doing well in the serps. But the clones that didn't do many changes are suffering.

[moftary]

I have two popular websites. One is ranked #2 for "mycompany" and "my company" which are two very popular keywords. The 2nd one is "veryuniquename" and used to rank #1 since it went live, now it's fallen out of google serps (the index page only! the rest of website pages still there). I asked google about it and they said they are going to forward my message to the engineering team.

I am somehow worried.

--mOftary

[Marshall Clark]

eyezshine - in many of the cases of hijacking that I've seen the hijacking site is only using a small block of text from the hijacked site (maybe 2-3 sentences). The hijacker pages are made up of several dozen of these snippets taken from many different sites on the same topic.

If it was duplicate content alone that was causing the problem it seems like the solution would have to involve not just randomizing the page but also some part of the content inside of this short snippet. Do you agree?

[Dayo_UK]

Another problem is caused by the domain.com <->www.domain.com problem. Which is easily fixed and works great and has brought back one of my sites that was completely banned from google within just a month of redirecting the non www to the www.domain.com

I am wondering if this is a problem with some of my sites - I have put the redirect in.

For people who have seen this as a problem were the symptons a total loss of the homepage/interal pages or just a downranking?

[AndyA]

Geez...I heard that relative links (those without the www.domain) were the best way to go from a coding standpoint. I also discovered that Google had pages listed for my site both with and without the www. Since there were more pages without, I made sure everything on my site was directed to the domain without the www, and did a 301 redirect on everything with www.

Now it seems that using relative linking is not a good thing. Has anyone determined that using absolute linking with the "www.domain whatever page.html" in all internal links puts a stop to the redirect issue?

I hate to go back and change everything that I just changed, but my site is MIA in Google now, and has been since December 17th. I'm now looking at anything that could have possibly caused this, but I think I'm going overboard in trying to appease Google and get my former good rankings back.

[Yariva]

I have a site which myname.com domain name. Before Christmas I arranged a redirection from another domain name myname.co.uk to the myname.com. Both domains have the same myname. Our Google ranking dropped from 1-10 for all main keywords to below 50 and beyond. The redirection was done with an A-redirect on the .co.uk name server to the IP address we used to have for the myname.com.

It took a while before I found out what had happened. The ISP for myname.com moved our server and without us knowing started to use a new IP address for the .com domain. They put a temporary 302 redirect from the old IP address to the new one while the myname.co.uk was still pointing to the old address. The result was no traffic and I guess we were getting a Google penalty for a 302 redirect. This is corrected now but things seem to get better very slowly.

[eyezshine]

>eyezshine - in many of the cases of hijacking that I've seen the hijacking site is only using a small block of text from the hijacked site (maybe 2-3 sentences). The hijacker pages are made up of several dozen of these snippets taken from many different sites on the same topic.

Right but those are not 302 redirect hijackers and I don't believe they are causing the problem unless they are cloaking. The problem ones are the ones that are using your exact page but google indexes their url.

When you check google's cache of the page and it's exactly your page content, then that is 302 hijacking.

Then there are other bugs google has and I cannot figure out why but I'm working on it. For some reason google indexes urls like this...

www.domain.com%22/
Similar pages

www.domain.com%5C%22/
Similar pages

www.domain.com%5C/
Similar pages

www.domain.com%22%3E%3Cimg/
Similar pages

www.domain.com%22%3Edirectory/
Similar pages

Those are some of the results I get when I do an inurl:domain.com search on google. My site does not get alot of traffic from google but it does get some. Also the home page cannot be found at all.

The random content and fixing the no www problem did not fix this site and it's ranking problem. I just don't understand why google would index urls like that?

I used a spider and indexed my site with it to see if I could figure out if it was my site that had the problem but my site came up clean with no broken links like the ones google is listing.

So I can only assume that another site is linking to mine wrong but I have so many pages linking to my site that it would be impossible to figure out who it is? Plus the site is #1 in Yahoo and MSN for a popular money keyword and has no problems at all.

But leave it to google to mess everything up.

[crashingflwrgrl]

After further investigation I've determined I definitely don't have a problem with hijackers. I am currently trying an experiment though. I have temporarily removed my links page (I can't control who links to me but I CAN control who I link too) and I have removed all re-directs (I own numerous domains and have had them all pointing to 1 site).

My links page now states simply that it is down for re-design and re-organization and will be back at an unspecified date.

I'll give it a bit of time and maybe? I'll notice a change in Google.