Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
I used the email address as provided by GoogleGuy and included ‘canonicalpage’ in the subject line. Also included in each email were the specifics and details of the URL’s redirecting to my sites as GoogleGuy suggested.
Here are the Reply’s from Google:
Reply 1:
“Thank you for bringing this to our attention. We understand your concern about the inclusion and ranking of your site. Please note that there is almost nothing a competitor can do to harm your ranking or have your site removed from our index.”
Reply 2:
“If you are concerned about another site linking to your site, we suggest contacting the webmaster for the site in question.”
The two separate replies contradict themselves. The first reply is an outright denial that your site can be damaged by a competitor. However you could argue that “almost nothing” is a disclaimer.
The second reply from Google suggests that you can be harmed by a competitor and that the onus is on you to get the redirects taken down by the hijackers.
Unfortunately in my case, the Romanian and Russian sites intentionally using 302 redirects, using my title and description in their URL’s, and a cached version of my page, don’t answer their email, neither do their hosting companies.
Anyone got a PR 10 with a 302 redirect to google.com? If I had one I would sure do it!
I've seen a one-page website with PR10 - a Google main page highjack. IN FACT, I JUST LOOKED AT IT AGAIN TO MAKE SURE I WASN'T SMOKING ..., AND IT IS THERE SHOWING PR10.
You, GoogleGuy dude, the one so "no this is not an issue", if you PM me, I will even give you the URL.
[edit]
On second thought...maybe I should sell this URL to CNN
[/edit]
[edit2]
I just checked again, it is only PR10 in FireFox, it is 0 in IE, so that's not a 302-highjack
[/edit2]
The few sites that stopped coming up for their own unique domain names after Allegra had stuff in them that didn't mesh with the current algo. I suspect, in at least some cases, sites not ranking for their own unique names is more a side effect of the recent algo changes rather than a root cause. For two sites I've worked on that were outranked for their own unique names, they've both came back in the rankings (even before update of yesterday which seems to have relaxed things a bit), even though the scraper links and redirects were still there.
Not that I want google to get any kind of penalty... from their own search engine but it would make a good example for their engineers to study?
If the site user wants that page removed, they can with Google's URL removal tool.Google does not allow you to remove someone else's URL. Also, note that it's not the PAGE that you'd want to remove, just the redirecting URL.
You don't have to remove their URL. If you remove the URL that the 302 is pointing to (that is on your site), then their page will have no content and won't be ranked.
[edited by: ciml at 4:21 pm (utc) on Mar. 25, 2005]
