Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
As a result our main site was hit with some ranking/filter issues back in Feb/March?. We requested url removal of the inferior site.
To the present....
Our main site was performing well, with constant FRESH tags, up until three weeks ago. At that time, we bumped into the 30s for most of our kw's. Our cache for our index is from early August (not consistent with cache dates prior) and the rest of the site is from January (it was previously from July).
Was doing some poking around and noticed that the site we requested to be removed is listed in Google again with the same exact cache of our index page from our main site!
Anyone else experience anything like this?
Having a robots.txt does often not help. It blocks the Googlebot to respider the unwanted URLs and these URLs will get stuck in the index for years, eventually getting the supplemental status.
According to my experience, it is better to let Googlebot spider the unwanted site, but add the following meta tag to the head section of each page:
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow">
This will cause all unwanted duplicate copies to be removed from the index and your other site should get back in the index at the old position. The total process of spidering and deleting the old sites may take a few weeks to a few months, dependent on the number of pages and the frequency Googlebot visits that site.
Try asking google whats up and they respond,
"We are sorry to hear, there is a problem, our robots failed, good luck we are not going to help you!"
Requested a url removal again. Placed noindex tags on the same site. Site is out of Google.
However, my good site, which is 5 years old and was an authority in the industry (top three for years out of 523 million results) is now not even being returned in results with and without filter=0.
Site is still in index. Still has PR.
What is the deal?
Hopefully, the data from my site is in the middle of being implemented.
I also noticed that that when I search for the url of my site, the cache date is old, but the listing is new (description is updated).
When I examine 'pages from the site', there are old pages listed removed last year listed as supplemental. I am also missing several pages from the index.
What is the deal?
Also check for non www results I bet you got some there also, but that is not what caused the problem, first later it will give you troubles.
I can not understand why now, I am having this issue. I have had a 302 redirect set-up for almost 9 months. The cache of all the supplemental results are from January 05!
What is the deal?
You expect the entire site will eventually get PR 0 and booted from the index?
sticky me your site I will have a look, but please only if its nothing kinky/wierd :)
Should I just sit back and see what happens, or is there any initiative you suggest.
So we:
* Return HTTP Status 410 for pages that are truly gone, not a 302, and not 404,
* Added a ref="nofollow" attribute to the anchor tag links to these pages
* Changed our robots.txt to exclude the set of pages we wanted to get rid of
* Used the Google removal tool as well
Yet we still see pages in the index, pages we don't want showing in the SERPs (not high, but there), and Googlebot still keeps trying to get the page. allinurl shows ~250 pages (something like 10 pages of search results sorted or filtered 25 different ways).
BUT ...
We did not add meta noindex,nofollow tags. Do I read correctly that recent experience suggests this is the only thing that actually works?
Thanks!
1: There are 200+ different sites like so:
/www.mysite.com/ URL moved, Please ...
/www.mysite.com/ URL moved, Please visit wierdsite.com.
wierdsite.com/www.mysite.com/ - Supplemental Result - Similar pages
2: When I repeat the seach including duplicates the non-www version of my site comes back as well.
Seems like a 302 issue. I still can not understand why I would be plagued with this now, 9 months after setting up a 301 redirect.
Why not also make some changes in the content of your duplicate site so that if it continues to be listed anyway, it may not look like a duplicate?
-Tex
Still I say if you are in that situation, I got hit by the googlebug 302, tha means that another site has a link to you (302 link) which google then thinks its unique page/site then you at once have a dublicated situation, google will not corect this problem, my hope is that once they will get back to have a good search engine they will update there supplemental results DB and then we could MAYBE get out of this dublicated situation, because many of those old 302 links are in there caches.
Still look for other domains that has your title and a copy of your page in the cache, also try to take a part of a unique text from your site and past in to a "your text" search in google.
What I have tried:
contact google, googleguy, matt...
used the removal tool
contact the hijackers and the sites with a 302 link
changed some of my pages.
made 301 from non www to www for 5 month ago, the non www is still in the index.
IM SURE i dont have a ban, the site has NEVER been hit badly in ANY update and its as clean as it gets.
I update the content on the index about once every few months so that I avoid the scraping issue.
As mentioned, I see alot of this:
/www.mysite.com/ URL moved, Please ...
/www.mysite.com/ URL moved, Please visit wierdsite.com.
wierdsite.com/www.mysite.com/ - Supplemental Result - Similar pages
Would this be a cause of problem?
If you mean seaching for possible googlebug 302 on yahoo, no you can not do that.
About the site urls, I would not say its a problem if they dont have a cache of your site, but I also have such sites as you mentioned pointing/copying the domain.
Do you think I should do more that just check the sites I link to see if they are penalized in Google? Or do you think I should see if they are suffering any sort of 302 bugs?
I have always been very careful with who I link to, but it seems as though there is more checking that needs to be done than just checking to see if a site has PR still and/or is still showing in the index.
Am I reading too deep into this whole thing?
<b>Is it merely something out of my hands?</b>
Site has been gone from SERPS since my last post.
However, site is being returned in results when you search for KWs in quotes.
I hope this is the first step for good things to come.
I have had a 302 redirect set-up for almost 9 months.
If this is true, you are the cause of your problems... The proper handling of a 302 (undefined) redirect is to request the page from the original location, not the location being redirected to. You are effectively 'hi-jacking' your own (good) site with the site you would like to be removed -- If you are using and continue to use a 302, the site you are redirecting (would like removed) will not ever be removed permanently (unless Google decides to throw HTTP Standards out the window), and you will quite possibly continue to harm the site you would like indexed.
For more information on redirects, I highly recommend reviewing what the W3C has to say about the proper handling of redirects by user-agents.
Justin
I do not have a 302 on my 'bad' site, the one I want removed.
I have a 302 on the 'good' site to avoid the www and non-www indexing issues.
I have come to the conslusion that the re-listing of the 'bad' site and my negative effects on the good site was coincidence and I was hit with a canonical url issue instead.
Justin
BTW Agree with the coincidence summary of your last post...
