Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
I was doing my monthly check of what other loser sites out there are using my site's name in their url, hoping to out rank me in Google.
For this test, I used the Google command operator kwown as "ALLINURL:" to see who was using my site name in their URL. You should try it on your site too!
You run the command like this:
allinurl:YourWebSite.com
Google returns all the sites using your domain name in their url. So Monday night, I found a half dozen obvious scam links on the search engine results page (SERP) that were inactive pages, returning 404 errors.
I began to use Google's automatic URL removal tool which removes dead links out of Google and submitted about a half dozen of these sites. If you choose the "Urgent" option, Google spiders the URL instantly, looking for a NOINDEX command. Since it gets a 404 error instead, Google will just remove the page from the index, even if you don't own it. (Normally you must be the owner fo the domain and place the noindex command on your site for Google to remove the URL).But that's kind of a benefit for those of you whose rankings have suffered from scammers like this. Google will just remove the page if it sees a 404 error.
Anyway, after I submitteda few of these scammers dead URLs, Google listed them as Pending Removal, all of a sudden I tried to submit another one, and Google's URL tool replied with a 404 error after I hit submit. I thought at first, maybe Google's server is having issues. But Tuesday night, smae thing, tonight I tried it, and when I hit submit, the explorer browser globe just sits there spinning 20 minutes, and still no response back from Google.
2 Questions:
1) Are you guys seeing the same thing?
2) 3 of the sites I submitted for removal were denied for removal, so I went back tonight to check on them. All of a sudden, 3 sites who were down and 404 when Google crawled them Monday, are up and running now with adwords, or other nonsense, just to be up and running without a 404. Hence the denial of URL removal for those 3 sites.
That seems suspicious don't you think, that it would be down one day, then google crawls it to remove it, and the site comes back to life. Anyone experience this too?
Even if it is not removing properly at the moment, when it was functioning correctly it simply removed pages from human view for about 5-6 months and they magically appear again, even with noindex rules and robots.txt.
It's a common joke Im sure around WebmasterWorld
Tonight I was able to get the tool to accept one submission, but none thereafter.
Ok, I was able to submit another 20 or so dead links to Google's URL removal tool last night after I started this post. But it is opersating flakey.
For some reason, one "dead link URL" I submit will be immediatley accepted, while another one will have Google sitting there spinning its wheels and coming back with a server error. I think it's a bug in their tool.
Anyway, just from last night until this morning, 6 URLS have been "completed" (dead URL was removed from Google's index)according to the status window inside Google's removal tool, so we do know that the tool is working!
You should all test your site to see who is doing this to you, and use the "Remove an outdated link" feature of the Google URL removal tool.
If your site is listed in DMOZ directory or if you enjoy high ranking on specific keywords, you can bet with almost certainty that your site has been scraped by numerous scammers. Juut check your log files for crawlers (user agents) that don't look like Googbots or Yahoo Slurps or MSNs.
Nothing boils my blood more than seeing snipets of my sites stolen from us, then used to outrank us in Google, and these sites show up for a search using a unique sentence on our web site, but you click on their search result and all you see there is Google Adwords, no content!
And THEN, many of those search results are dead links, outranking your site! So now you get hit with duplicate content penalties in your Google Ranking by sites that are not even up and running.
The beauty of this removal tool is even if the scammers wise up and relaize their site is no longer in the index and try to resubmit, they cannot get it back into the index for 6 months! That's how the index operates according to the Google removal Tool.
Froom Google's FAQ:
If I remove my site using the public removal tool, how long will it be excluded?
Pages removed using our automatic URL removal system are excluded from our index for at least 6 months regardless of whether they become available to our crawler during that time. Please keep in mind that we're unable to manually add pages to our search results, even those that have been removed through this automatic removal system.
The site must actually return a 404 or the DNS must no longer exist.
