Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
It quickly became clear that her site had been crawled via a high PageRank proxy. This copy of her site ranked at #1 for all meaningful terms from the site itself, replacing hers (which sank).
She contacted the proxy owner, who readily admitted that he had only dabbled with the proxy software. He apologised and immediately blocked Googlebot from the proxy. He also requested removal of those pages from Google.
The copy of her site under the proxy disappeared within days.
Problem solved? No. Her site has not recovered at all. Its position in Google remains a shadow of where it was before the incident.
Question: Is there a norm recovery time from a duplicate penalty? Or does recovery never actually occur?
Understandably, she's pretty narked with Google!
Frankly, she won't contact Google in any case as she now deeply resents them (understandably)! However, despite this, I always felt that they would at some point correct the situation of their own accord, once they re-spidered and realized the other copy had gone.
I do understand how vindictive Google can be in terms of assigning permanent penalties, but always believed that as they are well aware of their failings in this sort of area, they would have a self corrective routine in play.
Perhaps not.
I believe that what you see there will become the major part of what Google will show across most DCs sometime next month....
My expectation was that everything would be corrected with the next full crawl, once Googlebot discovered that the original was the only copy left. But no. The old vindictive, misplaced, permanent penalty seems to apply again, and another excellent innocent site bites the dust. No wonder she is annoyed.
I must admit that I have in the past read all about page-jacking and the rest, but assumed that it wasn't such a big deal, as Google would correct itself once the root cause was addressed. Two months into this it seems not to be.
"Frankly, she won't contact Google in any case as she now deeply resents them (understandably)!"
Maybe you could file a reinclusion request on her behalf. What are friends for ;-)
And risk her wrath? Scary.
Seriously though, I thought reinclusion was for excluded sites. This isn't excluded, just surprised. Or doesn't it matter?
On the wider picture, I now wonder just how many sites they have done this to, and why, when they must know about the problem (which doesn't happen with MSN or Yahoo), they don't just correct it with the next crawl. Surely that would be a simple matter for them?
It's the logic of the situation that I find difficult.
No.
Basically what happened was that Googlebot hit the proxy site, which proxied her site through the software, making it look like the entirity of her content was on there. As that site was a PR7 (with other attributes) Google subsequently considered the proxy copied version to be the original.
The issue I raise above is that the proxy owner recognized what he did and addressed it immediately, yet Google still penalizes the original site month after the event!
It has nothing to do with links or link backs.
Is it anywhere to be seen in 72.14.207.99 at all?
I believe that what you see there will become the major part of what Google will show across most DCs sometime next month....
