Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
My site has always popped up as number 1 for this search as there simply is no competition. Oddly enough, my site had disappeared from the search results and was replaced by a popular travel forum.
I went to investigate.
I discovered copy from my site copy had been pasted it into the travel forum on February 25th by a well intentioned poster who was just trying to help.
When I went to Google to see why my page didn't show up in the results, I discovered my page has been penalized. I did the www.mysite.com/file-extension.html search and the result was the dreaded:
Your search - link:XMaKTkm89c8J:www.mysite.com/file-extension.html - did not match any documents.
This page has never had a problem of any kind on Google and is an important FAQ page. The last time it was changed was at new years when I changed the copyright date.
Travel forums are always "borrowing" info, photos and maps from my site. I have written to the lady who made the post and the fellow who owns the forum to point out the problem. I have no doubt that the owner will do all he can to stop this from recurring ... but the point is, I have to live with the penalty until it gets sorted out.
I submitted a spam report this morning and noted "GoogleGuy's" name in the message the hopes that this can be straightened out. I'll just have to wait and see.
This page has been in Google's index for years! Along comes a travel forum, copies my content and within three weeks ... I'm out!
I can only see this problem getting worse and worse with time, as clearly, Google cannot differentiate between originating sites and copycat sites. Yet they insist on the continued use of a flawed dup content filter! Why?
Maybe Google should consider using the Way Back Machine in conjunction with their filter. Perhaps then innocent sites wouldn't suffer the wrath of Google ... needlessly.
