Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
My site was doing very well in the SERPs. For over 2 years it had been on the first page for a competitive term (1.2 million listings). Then during the first week in January my site disappeared and traffic tanked for no obvious reason.
When searching for "site:www.mydomain.com" I noticed that my index page often wasn't listed or it appeared on about page 3 or 4 of the results after all my supplimental pages.
A search for "allinurl:mysite.com" often didn't show my index page at all but instead showed somebody else's domain (located in Turkey). When I clicked on this link, my site came up. When I clicked on the cached version of the site, it showed a very old cache of the page. This same site also showed up after all my results when doing a "site:www.mydomain.com"
Using a header checker tool on the site's URL I was able to see it was using a 302 link to my site.
Last night after reading some posts by crobb305 and others I went to Google.com and clicked on "About Google." Then I clicked on "Webmaster Info." Then I clicked on "I need my site information removed." Then I clicked on "remove individual pages." Where I found instructions on how to remove the page.
(Here's the exact page where I ended up. If mod needs to remove then snip away:) [google.com...]
I then clicked on the "urgent" link.
Then:
1. I signed up for an account with Google and replied back to them from an email they sent me;
2. I added the "noindex" meta tag according to their instructions and uploaded it to my site;
3. Using the instructions to remove a single page from the Google index, I added the hijacker's URL that was pointing to my site. (copy and paste from the result found on "allinurl" search)
This didn't work the first time because I had to remove a space from the url to get it to work.
4. I got a message back saying that the request would be taken care of within 24 hours. The URL that I entered showed on the uppper right hand part of the screen saying "removal of (hijacker's url)pending."
5. I then removed the "noindex" meta tag from my page and re-uploaded it to my site.
This morning the google account still shows the url removal as "pending" but when I do "site:" and "allinurl" searches the offending URL is gone and my index URL is back.
Conclusions and Speculations:
At some point last September, Google cached the hijack page's url pointing to my site. In January, Google penalized my site for duplicate content because it found both URL's and compared them. Mine got penalized because it was the only page that really existed. The hijacker's page didn't get penalized because it only existed as a re-direct to my site.
Because my index page was now penalized, it dropped almost completely from the SERPs. (Some of my suppliement pages showed up for obscure searches) but none of my money terms.
Because I haven't been able to get a response from the hijacker's webmaster, the 302 is still in place but it is buried deep in his site and the last Google cache of the page was sometime in September. Therefore with some luck Google won't re-index it any time soon.
Will my site return to the SERPs? I don't know. Any thoughts?
I believe that you have hit a wall with those URLs. Had similar experience where one hijacker URL has my cache, but goes thru a page with nothing but metarefresh=0 tag to my site before the redirect. So G can't see the noindex tag I temp. added to the page, it just sees the 'in between' page.
The other example I came across was a hijacker URL with my cache (Nov. 04) but the page is gone and replaced with "This Account has been terminated..." So, although it is still cached, there is no redirecting page currently in existence for me to shoot down.
Short of contacting the hosting companies or the hijackers themselves in such cases, I don't think there's anything we can do but continue to wait for G to fix this, or wait for G to become so full or irrelevant bs that people start using engines that list our sites correctly.
Have you corrected your
www.domain non-www.domain
condition?
Some of those wayward "jacker" pages could really present a problem to get removed.
Remember a script can do what it wants and Google is anouncing its presence.
I would really appreciate it if someone would post a step by step process to remove those redirects.
Lorel...
Please see post#1 of this thread.
If they won't look at my "individual site" then what good is it going to do me to email them. They'll just send you a canned response if anything at all.
Below is an example of the links
www.crapsite.com/d/p.php?url=http://www.mysite.com%2F (using 301 redirect)
www.crapsite.com/RedirectToPage.aspx?RedirectTo=http://www.mysite.com&nLinkId=11111
(using 302 redirect)
I see these two when i do inurl: mysite.com
Please advise, thanx!
Thanks for your spirit of sharing.
Yesterday .. have done exactly what Idaho did to remove a hijacked page which was showing when running site:www.mysite.dk and allinurl:www.mysite.dk.
Also followed crobb305 tips.
Today I can see that the hijacked page has been removed totally from my site listing.
Wish you all a great weekend
That's my approach. The majority of 302 redirects using pages from my site are from non-commercial sites that must be using CMS packages that create go.php?id= pages to track click-thrus. The more popular a site is, the more chances there are of those kinds of links, and of getting booted out of Google because of it. Will it really be practical to use the Google removal tool for every new link someone makes using a CMS package like that? And does anyone want to spend all their time checking for those links? Google needs to clean up its act. In the meantime, I've switched from using Google's free search to using MSN's free search at my site. That's another way to send Google a message.
Jim
I removed two url's hijacking my homepage and that was about 7 hours ago.
both still on "pending"
?
I updated my asp code to give a 301 redirect from non-www to www.
I updated all my links to full urls instead of relative.
I added some asp code to auto-generate a <base href> tag for each page.
Just checked today and their url no longer shows up in a search for my page. :)
My older site is still hijacked though. Only difference is that I haven't figured out a way to auto generate a <base href> to my 400 pages (only have cgi and javascript to work with). Other problem is that it's still a split site which compounded the situation.
Kimkia,
Have you corrected your www.domain non-www.domain
condition?
I've just done this via htaccess. I'm not sure how it relates to the hijacking exactly, but since you explained it was a good idea, I went ahead and changed it.
When I copy the URL from the results to remove it, I get the following error:
That URL contains the following invalid characters: " "
Ok... it doesn't contain those characters, however it does contain :/. Here's what the url I'm trying to remove looks like:
keyword.keyword.crappyhijacksite.biz/mod_http%253A%252F%252Fwww. mysite.com%252F.html
When I change the %253A to : and %252F to / and submit the URL for removal, the page times out. Yippie.
Thanks
Short of contacting the hosting companies or the hijackers themselves in such cases,
Good luck with trying to get a host to do anything. Usually dishonest hijackers host their own site.
And IF the hijacker is using a cloaked page, or the process takes you to a different page between the redirect and your page for more instructions, like was described above, and trying to remove the link in Google DOESN'T work, can it INSTEAD harm your site?
I would caution anyone trying this to make sure they understand what is happeneing or you could disable your home page for up to 90 days if you make a mistake or it doesn't work as is "planned".
....hopefully, that it followed the link, found the nofollow tag (on your site) and removal of entered URL is "pending".
then...straight back onto ftp and change it all back.
I did it with two pages and the nofollow tag was on my site for maybe 70 seconds max.
haha....you just *know* Googlebot was prowling around at that point! LOL!
esllou - look in the serps site:yourdomain.com then you can tell when they are removed and it takes less then 24 hours.
How can I found out if any of my sites is hijacked?
Thanks
but no answer yet.
How can I found out if any of my sites is hijacked?
Thanks
skuba,
On Google do the following:
allinurl:yoursite.com
Check for links that don't come from your site.
site:yoursite.com
All results should be from your site
allinurl:yoursite.com "unique text from your homepage"
The above will show you if someone's duping your content with a 302.
google.com type site:www.yourdomain.com look for other domains that got your title and description.
Does that mean they might have taken down the redirects or does it mean I'm dead because google can't recognize the link?
To find out if you have a possible problem caused by a 302 and other conditions do a
site:yourdomain in Google
All of the listings returned should belong to you .... if there are any that do not have your domain name before the first / you have a problem ... it may only be a case of one page being duplicated or other things being set in motion.
Kimkia,
One of the things that can be set in motion is for the script to provide google bot with a list of places to visit.
If you use relative urls then the script can tell google to spider www.domainname and domainname thus having google shred your site by duplicating every page.
The rewrite rule redirects prevent that shreding from having any lasting impact.
Your nice little site was already in the process. More pages were duplicated than the ones that you found other domains entries for.
This is very nasty. I've got a large site in recovery from this. I had a large number of duplicate pages.
Better still, my sub-directory index page, of which the hijacked page was one, has now rocketed back to the top of the SERPs for three different variations of a popular search term.
I'm just trying to get the courage to repeat this with my home page. If I have dramatic results there, I'll be very happy. Thank you everyone for sharing your ideas and instructions on this difficult issue!
do a site:domainname
If you see both www.domainname and domainname and use relative href you can have a major problem coming at you.
It just takes a link to each alias and or ip if allowed to split or shred your site.
This will be started by a site (or possible yourself) or an injected page pointing to www.dmainname adn domainname and/or ip addy. Google's bot will do the rest.
I think the mod rewrite rules that heal this mess are posted here somewhere about seventy times or so. It take a bit of time.
Time for sleep.
Good luck
allinurl:mysite.com returns several dozen that look like this:
[example.com...]
The common denominator is that all these so-called directories are "powered by I#*$!USA".
Do I need to remove each one? If so, do I need to wait a certain amount of time between each so gbot doesnt happen to catch me with my pants down adding and deleting noindex, nofollow?
Do I need to remove each one? If so, do I need to wait a certain amount of time between each so gbot doesnt happen to catch me with my pants down adding and deleting noindex, nofollow?
My concern exactly...googlebot visits frequently, and I would hate for that visit to coincide with NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW, thus my hesitation in taking down these hijackers to my home page.
The bug - If he forgot to type the . after www like wwwmydomain.com - he says it would go to a scraper site. He figured it was his sesrch bar and found a trojan of some sort but after formatting twice it still does it.
The other guys suggest that he should do it one more time so he does. And then someone looks at his site and notices it too.
turns out it was an actual other domain name wwwyoursite ..
http/www.yoursite.com is an appended url like onename.anothername.com
so watch those dots
When i search for site name it doesnt show up! When i search for sitename.com i just get an url only listing "site.com" but all the other pages seem to be listed but my homepage is GONE!
Update: This wierd its showing on 3rd page for its own unique name and all sites linking to it are on top? Just yesterday it was on top! Also it seem googlebot visited me yesterday maybe it saw the no index tab which i had on for just a sec to remove the offedning url?
The easy fix is to just remove the "noindex" and submit the URL to Google for spidering.
The largest single problem in the entire universe is the wetware.
illusionist,
What's this noise, you can't even recognise your own site ;).
If it has more inbounds to deep pages than the home page the home page doesn't have to be on top and further be careful of the search you use. Some are very general.
See post #610 in [webmasterworld.com...]
for an eample of what I mean,
