Lost in Google

[rshandy]

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?

[stargeek]

in response to IP based protection. the ip of the website is not the ip you'd be worried about, it would be google's spider IP and delivering different content to them is a no-no.

you could check for referrer and if it matches a hijacking page you could display a different page or nothing at all, but this could be interpreted as cloaking.

[MikeNoLastName]

I'd say someone is probably aware of the problem, since my new thread about not seeing Gbot since 2/28 was intercepted. Strange things are afoot at the Circle G.

[stargeek]

wait, can you please explain that a little more i'm confused.

[stargeek]

wow you're right, a few of my sites that normally get heavy gbot traffic have not seen gbot for an unnusually long time.

[MikeNoLastName]

All domains we have, even ones with no missing pgs haven't seen Gbot since 2/28. Oops, just found a single access on 3/3 on a multi-thousand pg domain that usually gets a hundred+ a day. Musta been a fluke :). Maybe they're trying to contain the damage, by not adding any more fuel to the fire.
Also their submit page (with the type-in-the-graphicized text) was not working properly earlier today. Now a new one (copy of the older version) seems to be accepting submissions.

[stargeek]

yeah that sounds like what it is to me, or at least i hope thats what it is.

[Bobby]

the ip of the website is not the ip you'd be worried about, it would be google's spider IP and delivering different content to them is a no-no

Good point, I should've thought about that.
Ok, can you elaborate on checking for referrer?
If we simply tell our web site to NOT RETURN html (or return something different) then couldn't we solve the problem? Would Google even know that we are "cloaking" and would it penalize for this if it is directed at certain IPs but not Google's?

[stargeek]

Good point, I should've thought about that.
Ok, can you elaborate on checking for referrer?
If we simply tell our web site to NOT RETURN html (or return something different) then couldn't we solve the problem? Would Google even know that we are "cloaking" and would it penalize for this if it is directed at certain IPs but not Google's?

i think you're misinterpreting here, forget about ip-based protection, it won't work.

what i'm talking about is having the page check for the referrer of each view, that is the page accessed directly before it. if the referrer is a page that is known to be hijacking your page then your site would not serve results.

problem with this is gbot doesn't provide referrer information. so this wont work either sorry.

[acee]

If Google is giving the impression that a 302 redirect link from an innocent site is hijacking your page and effectively infringing your copyright, who is responsible?

The redirect in itself isn't a problem, it's the way that it is interpreted by the SE.

[zeus]

Stargeek - if you have been hijacked/redirecting problem you will not see googlebot, maybe it steps by for a few pages then its gone again, as soon you see a lot of spidering again, you could see better times until you get hijacked again.

I think the only solution to this is to make a big letter or email, where we tell them about the problem and if nothing is being done, we have to take in to use the hijacker way to create our site, we have to follow the way google wants there pages and if we are enogh webmasters they will listen. I fthis is getting real public how easy it is to hurt other sites, the whole index will be hijackers, we are on a good way already with all those scrapers/supplemental results and we see the omitted results so quickly because there are dublicates somewhere or its broke.

I also think the title in the thread should have a text redirecting probmes on google.

[arras]

the only reason of all the cr-p is that Google accepts almost anybody to adsence ,at the moment the half of the 8000000000 pages indexed are 100% cra..p pages made only for adsence,just 3 days ago i descover a site with 200.000 pages ranks in 200.000 results for one of the most competitive terms in internet business,if you go to the page you wont find what you look,so probably you will click on the gooooooo....ads.If thats the way the net is gona be,then goodbuy.

[jk3210]

Lots of valid sites return 302s when you check the header of one of their links --Yahoo, WebmasterWorld --lots of them.

So, it looks like a simple 302 is *not* the problem. Right?

[sailorjwd]

The one way I see to get this 302 issue fixed is to somehow get it into the news headlines. Public companies hate bad press.

If someone could find several 'name brand' sites that have been hijacked - then if someone here has ability or contacts in the media then it would be great to see a segment on 60 Minutes 'The Hijacking of the Internet'.

How about someone hijacting the irs dot gov site - that would get some attention.

[Bobby]

rfung your sticky mailbox is full:

The list of hijackers I am tracking has grown to about 50 and is probably well into the hundreds, I just don't have time to check everyone out.

If anyone suspects their site has been hijacked I suggest you perform the following search in Google for your site:

www.yourdomain.com -site:yourdomain.com

If you see quite a few domains with titles that begin with small letters (not capitalized) try clicking on them to see if they all appear similar.

[jddux]

I am having the same problem with my site, the TITLE and DECRIPTION dissapeared. I saw this happen to a competitor once before and a few weeks later he was gone from the results and has never came back. I did the inurl: and saw some questionable results, one looks like it is a translated page but it has page rank so I am worried it got indexed somehow and is considered a duplciate page.

Here is the url of the duplicate page:
[l33t.0pointer.de...]

Is it possible that this could be hurting us?