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Lost in Google

         

rshandy

6:39 pm on Feb 27, 2005 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



My site has been in 1st page serps for many years. Just a few weeks ago, my listing went from a title display and decription to just this:

www.mydomain.com/
Similar pages

In addition, my Yahoo listing disappeared as well. I then did a Yahoo search for pages with my domain included and found most of my interior pages indexed but not my home page.

What happened? Is it possible my site was not ready to be crawled when Googlebot and Slurp robots visied my site - simultaneously?

This is a very "white hat" site - no tricks at all, just good content...

I went and manually requested my site be spidered on both Google and Yahoo, and sent an email to Yahoo requesting any explanation as well.

Is there anything else I can do? Any ideas of why this happened?

Lorel

5:22 pm on Mar 12, 2005 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



If those other two domains are only for the purpose of providing links to your main site and don't have any value of their own - I read somewhere in another thread that Google is starting to penalize this tactic because so many spammers are doing it.

stuuued

2:31 am on Mar 13, 2005 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



I suspect that my site has been hijacked. But I am new to all of this and are not even sure what a sktscraper site is. Maybe one of you can explain here. Also, my site is listed in my profile, anyone care to point out which (if any) have hijacked my site?

stinky

2:37 pm on Mar 15, 2005 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



I did a search in google with inurl:www.mysite.com and got back two results both with my domain. One had www.mysite.com with a discription and the other result looked just like this www.mysite.com%20/
Anybody have any ideas why a "%20/" showing up after my domain? I never used "%20/" in any of my page names.

stinky

3:48 pm on Mar 15, 2005 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



I did a search in google with inurl:www.mysite.com and got back two results both with my domain. One had www.mysite.com with a discription and the other result looked just like this www.mysite.com%20/
Anybody have any ideas why a "%20/" showing up after my domain? I never used "%20/" in any of my page names.

zeus

4:13 pm on Mar 15, 2005 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



Stinky - Its a link pointing to you that has a space in the link, thats all.

stinky

9:41 pm on Mar 15, 2005 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



When i did a search for allinurl:mysite.com i found this on google, www.domain.co.uk/link/link.php?id=42 it had my web site title and discription in serps, when i clicked the link it took me to my site. When i checked the site cach of that link i saw my home page. This site has my link on their link page but it is a straight html link. Why am i finding this redirect in the serps? Also when i search for allinurl:www.mysite.com the above link does not show up. Anybody have any ideas why? Should i e-mail this site and ask them to remove the redirect link i found in a search?
-thanks

jk3210

10:15 pm on Mar 15, 2005 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



<<link.php?id=42>>

When "link.php" querys the database looking for the value "id=42," guess what it finds.

(hint: your url)

<<Should i e-mail this site and ask them to remove the redirect link i found in a search?>>

Sure, they problably will remove it for you. But, Google won't. Why? Because everytime gbot goes back to "link.php?id=42" it finds valid content --yours.

claus

12:06 am on Mar 16, 2005 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



Yes, it is no use to just remove the link. The script URL should return a "404 Not Found" otherwise you can not remove it from Google, and Googlebot will not flag it for removal either.

Emmett

12:20 am on Mar 16, 2005 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member




Yes, it is no use to just remove the link. The script URL should return a "404 Not Found" otherwise you can not remove it from Google, and Googlebot will not flag it for removal either.

Claus,

When I had the redirect site remove my link, it now returns their home page. My concern is that if the link is no longer in their links list will googlebot ever re-index it and figure out that its pointing somewhere else now? Should I add a link to their script to my site just to get google to re-index it?

Thanks

jk3210

1:19 am on Mar 16, 2005 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



<<When I had the redirect site remove my link, it now returns their home page.>>

Big problem.

You must be able to type the EXACT original url into your browser address window and make sure your page no longer comes up. If it does come up, then that's what gbot will find when it re-spiders the link.

Simply having the offending link removed from the hijacker's page isn't enough. The problem is that the original url is still in Google's database and gbot keeps going back DIRECTLY to it --not via the hijacker's page.

And trying to get it removed via the URL console is no good because it still appears to be a live page to G.

If it doesn't return a 404, gbot won't remove it.

zeus

1:31 am on Mar 16, 2005 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



How does it look with posts to news sites or papers, have reached a good site / company.

I know USToday had a little about scrapers and adsense so maybe they need a follow up about the lets say HUGE problem with redirecting links

Emmett

2:39 am on Mar 16, 2005 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member




If it doesn't return a 404, gbot won't remove it.

It doesn't return a 404 now but it does point to their site instead of mine. I assume thats ok?

On a related note:
I found another (maybe only) source of my duplicate content penalty. In attempting to 301 redirect my ip address (left over from old setup) to the www site I was using the following code which google never seemed to understand (names changed and spaces added to protect the innocent):

Redirect 301 / http: //www. mysite. com/

I then changed it to (ip changed):
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^123.45.678.9:69
RewriteRule (.*) http: //www. mysite. com$1 [R=301,L]

This redirected the browser from my ip address just fine and I didn't think anything of it until I put it through the WebmasterWorld Server Header Checker which was returning 200 OK!

So now I updated it to the following:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST}!^.* mysite \.com [NC]
RewriteRule (.*) http: //www. mysite. com$1 [R=301,L]

The last entry seems to be returning the proper 301 redirect.

Just thought I would post this for anyone else having a split site problem. Given that 1 dupe offense = 30 day penalty, 2nd offense = 60 day and 3rd = 90 day, I don't expect to see my site listed in google for a long while :(

claus

10:03 am on Mar 16, 2005 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



When I had the redirect site remove my link, it now returns their home page. My concern is that if the link is no longer in their links list will googlebot ever re-index it and figure out that its pointing somewhere else now? Should I add a link to their script to my site just to get google to re-index it?

It's okay that it returns their home page if they are now 302 redirecting to themselves in stead of you.

As jk3210 wrote, Googlebot will pick the link from Google's own list of links at some point and spider it, regardless if it's found on the page or not. I don't know how long this will take, but it could take some time.

If you can enter the exact URL of the script in a server header checker (or in a browser with your User-Agent set to the full Googlebot UA string) and see another site than yours, then this particular link will no longer harm your site once Googlebot gets around to spider it.

You could try speeding things up by submitting the script URL to Google.

So now I updated it to the following:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST}!^.* mysite \.com [NC]
RewriteRule (.*) http: //www. mysite. com$1 [R=301,L]

I would use this syntax in stead, but if yours works for you there's no need to change it:

----------------------------------
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.example\.com [NC]
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.example.com$1 [R=301,L]
----------------------------------

patoruzu

5:16 pm on Mar 16, 2005 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



A search with inurl:www.mysite.com shows this:

www.theirsite.com/world/chinese/web/body/www.mysite.com/?SLANG=zh&TLANG=ja&wb_lp=CHJA

Has theirsite.com hijacked mysite.com? Is mysite.com in trouble?

walkman

5:25 pm on Mar 16, 2005 (gmt 0)



"Has theirsite.com hijacked mysite.com?"
yes

"Is mysite.com in trouble?"
let's say it can't help you. Google might choose ignore them, you, or hurt both.

This 206 message thread spans 14 pages: 206