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?

[patoruzu]

Thank you, walkman. I've read that your site has been cloned by excite.co.jp, TOO. My problem is that some internal pages long indexed by Google have disappeared (though most not). I don't see any other explanation than this.

[theBear]

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

That DOESN'T mean that they have hijacked anything although they COULD have.

The proper search is site:mysite.com and all the urls highlighted in green should be yours if they aren't then you have definately been jacked. On a large site these searchs aren't always easy.

IIRC inurl returns all of the pages that have a ANY type of link to your site, both good and so called bad.

And by jacking I don't mean just violating copyright, partially copying content, or scraping content.

There are too many things that get classified as hijacking.

[stinky]

When I do a search on G for site:mysite.com the serps show pages from my site. Most of the page results have title and description and then there are some pages that just have my site’s url with no title or description. Why do some results show title description and some do not?

Also what is the difference between searching for site:mysite.com and site:www.mysite.com?

What is the best way to ask and explain to a webmaster to remove or/and fix a redirect link thats pointing to your site?

[walkman]

I'm emailing Google with excite.co.jp examples. Can you please do the same. tell them to forward it to the Engineering Dept I guess. This has to stop now. I can't go broke because of this nonsense

[zeus]

walkman ad a link to thise tread also

[crobb305]

Thank you, walkman. I've read that your site has been cloned by excite.co.jp, TOO

I had the same problem, but I was able to get the url removed in Google using their removal tool.

I'm emailing Google with excite.co.jp examples. Can you please do the same. tell them to forward it to the Engineering Dept I guess. This has to stop now. I can't go broke because of this nonsense

We all know that emailing them does no good. An email reader will open and delete the email.

I just can't believe we are stuck with the task of cleaning up Google's mess ourselves (using Google removal tool, emailing other webmasters, rewriting our content to remove duplication, etc). Ridiculous and just plain pathetic.

[JohnKelly]

After reading up on 302 hijacking and this and other sites, I want to verify that the method I use to link to other sites is not contributing to the problem.

I use a tracking script to link to outside sites, like this:

[mydomain.com...]

I checked and this does generate a 302 in the header. BUT I am also blocking /dir/linker.php in my robots.txt:

Disallow: /dir/linker.php

Should I change the php script to use a 301 redirect instead of a 302? Or is keeping the script in the robots.txt good enough?

BTW, I'm also doing this to preserve PageRank... since these are not reciprocal links I didn't want to use the standard direct link.

[Newwebguy1]

My site is one of the unlucky ones brought to their knees by this flaw within Google. My question is does anyone have a theroy about what Google is doing about this disaster and more importantly how soon will we see this problem resolved? Will it be a week, a month, or in one of the major updates? Is there any hope for a site recovering after being crushed by this flaw within Google? Last, but not least I know Google is taking this very seriously as this problem could have a huge impact on their future earnings, but why won't they comment on the flaw which is causing quality sites to fall into a black hole? thanks in advance for any advice.

[eyezshine]

I had about 3 sites fall into the "Black Hole" in May 2004 and I finally figured out what happened to them in December 2004 but never found a way to fix the problem except for using the Google url removal tool which works good enough except my rankings still never came back to where they were before.

It was February 2005 when I used the URL remover so we'll see what happens in the next update.

[Atticus]

As of last evening G is coming in third behind Y and MSN in my referrer logs. My listings continue to fall off a little more everyday. I'm being beat by pages with keyword blocks -- actual blocks of text at the bottom which are labeled "keywords," if you can believe it! I'm also being beat in one case by, "Important Announcement: This Web Site has been Discontinued." A real hot pick, that one...but why be bitter?

I have decided not to go crazy over this situation. I am going to pay more attention to ranking on Y and MSN.

I do have this sneaking suspicion that G will come back to me at some point, like a straying lover who returns with promises of happiness. Question is, will I fall for that old line again...

[1milehgh80210]

" but why won't they comment on the flaw which is causing quality sites to fall into a black hole? "

IMO it's a flaw they can't fix. (if they could fix it, they would have by now).
So any official comment could lead to
-more bad guys finding out about the bug, and exploiting it.
-stock drop.