Site: search shows unrelated/spam domains

[sasha]

when I search site:mydomain.com it brings up my site URLs with only less than 1% are actual URLs, others are supplemental and today I noticed quite a few completely unrelated domains (spam, junk sites) listed under in the same search results for site:mydomain.com (also supplemental). Anyone know what this is about?

[tedster]

My first guess is that you might have accidentally had a space between site: and your domain name. If do the search making sure that your domain name follows immediately after the colon, are those other domains still in the results?

[dmje]

I am seeing the same thing on one of my domains. Actually seeing it with or without the www. Seems to be affecting only one of our domains at the moment, hope to god it doesn't spread.

The unusual results are still there with the site command typed correctly.....good god gertie what a mess!

[Drum]

I am also seeing this, I am glad i found this post to see i am not the only one.

[sasha]

tedster, I wish it was that simple.

I have that link bookmarked for many years. and I check it every day many many times a day. :)

the point is site:domain is a simple command that shows their index for my site. no more and no less. I've never seen any foreign sites included for site:domain.com command. let alone hundreds of spam domains.

[tedster]

Now this becomes disturbing -- we can hope it's a short term glitch. Are the domains where this problem is showing up on shared IP addresses?

[steveb]

Google changed the site operator recently and screwed it up. Go figure.

[sasha]

my domain is on a dedicated box.

This bug is apparent when running site:subdomain.domain.com

[CainIV]

Yuo can confirm the same thing here for some of my sites. Figures...

[Bewenched]

Wow .. I just did a site:www.mydomain.com and nothing came up at all!

But ... if I do
site:www.mydomain.com "website name" then I get twice as many results as I did yesterday.

Should I be concerned or is the site: operator broken.

[Bewenched]

ok .. so now after doing that other search I go back and do a
site:www.mydomain.com it comes up finally ... whew...

[g1smd]

Hmm, last time anything like that happened, was when the "302 redirect URL hijack" stuff was in full swing.

[Bewenched]

302 redirect URL hijack

How can you test for that?

[dmje]

On our domain where I am seeing this happen, this is the snippet that I now see for one of our url's

<Sorry, no specifics.
See Forum Charter [webmasterworld.com]>

As you can see one phrase is repeated over and over. Believe me it is not coded that way.... apparently something is broken....again....

[edited by: tedster at 6:56 pm (utc) on Sep. 8, 2006]

[zeus]

hmm that seems to be the problem that started 2 years ago, where other sites have a 302/301 link to you, then they have your content as cache, then google filters you for dublicated pages and it takes years to get back.

Then you will get a PR0 and you are in google hell, Im sorry to say so.

[dmje]

In reference to my last post, that duplicated snippet was not showing yesterday. I have seen google do this before and then in a day or so it will be gone and the correct snippet will be there....I dont understand it...

[Liane]

now try searching: www.yoursite.com

Instead of the usual options which include:

the IBL's your site is credited with
The pages which Google has indexed
Sites which "mention" your site
Similar sites

etc.

All you get now is a list of all the sites which mention your site. Don't know what has happened, but it does look very strange indeed. Curiouser and curiouser.

Ummmm ... paging GoogleGuy, paging GoogleGuy, where are you GoogleGuy? :)

[reseller]

Liane

While waiting for GoogleGuy to show up ;-)

Would you be kind to mention the IP of google.com or the DC where you saw that happening on?

Thanks.

[Liane]

[google.com...]

[g1smd]

That could be any one of more than 600 IP addresses [webmasterworld.com] that Google uses. Many have different results.

[Atomic]

The job will be easier if you list the IP's without this problem.

[bears5122]

I am getting the same issues with one of my domains. The sites showing up do not look spammy, do not mention my site, aren't even in the same industry, and seem completely random.

[Rendezvous]

I nearly had a stroke when I saw my site: command returned 160,000 pages! Reloaded: 180,000! Reloaded again: 208,000! Reload: 225,000 pages!

Some of my pages are in these results, but it's mostly unrelated sites. Each time I reload they come up in a different, seemingly random, order and a varying amount.

I'm only seeing the strange behaviour on 2 of my dozen or so domains. All the others are returning expected results. Interestingly, the 2 domains returning wonky results were essentially dropped from google's index a month ago. Out of 30k~40k indexed pages on each site, it suddenly dropped to a couple hundred. From the looks of it, I'm not getting my pages reindexed, just a lot of random pages thrown in.

[tedster]

OK, I'm a believer - I've had my own close encounter with an alien site: search result.

Totally bizarre domains showed up while I was researching a domain for possible investment. It looks like the invasion is spreading. So something's broken with some of the site: results. Is anyone having traffic problems that showed up at the same time? Or is it just a frustration not to be able to see what urls Google has indexed for the domain?

[simey]

Is this a problem for large sites only, for now?

The sites showing in my site: search have 10-35M pages indexed.
(blog hosting, p0rn, etc)
My site has about 16K pages indexed.

[skweb]

Please reply if you see the same:

(1) Do your search for site:www.domain.com
(2) Look at the cache of the spam website
(3) At the bottom of the Google header, does it say "These terms only appear in links pointing to this page: www.domain.com"

I have the feeling is that the spammers maybe using my domain name as the anchor text and pointing it to a spammy website.

[toonarmy]

funny thing is if i try site:www.domain.com on google uk then its ok, but if i try it on netscape or aol which both use the google search results then 100s of domains that are not mine are mixed in with my domain page count

[Car_Guy]

I just checked my site:domain results and everything is fine.

Please explain something. If I had found a problem in the results as described earlier, as long as I'm the only one searching site:mydomain, what potential problems would I face?

[tedster]

The one I found so far has no problems except for their inability to find out what urls Google has in the index. Their rankings and traffic have not faltered.

[shortbus1662]

<Admin Note: This post was spliced into this thread from another location>

site: now gives me 19,000 results and all are non english. then it says click here to search for english. and when I do it gives 4k urls and the non english urls are gone.

WTH is going on?

[edited by: tedster at 12:33 am (utc) on Sep. 20, 2006]