Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Site is totally clean no iffy seo, not now or ever.
The weirdest thing of all is that if you put in our domain.com into google it returns the result for the .co.uk which if you type that in is not a site anyway it just goes straight to our .com
Massively confused as to what is going on. Site still pr6 homepage. some 20,000 pages of the .com in the index and 30,000 backlinks according to yahoo.
All other pages still in index and site ranking for some terms but nothing that the homepage held no1s for.
Call me paranoid but is it possible for a competitor to somehow have your page removed ( nearly all our backlinks are to our homepage ) we do have some over the past few months. Odd things have been happening we get sustained hack attempts daily and one breach succeeded us in knocking us of line for a day and totally mashed the server and back up server also- we had to rebuilt on a new server and get live gain down 18 hours. Thats just some of the rubbish thats happening at the moment. So could someone else cause your site to disappear... I have found that google remove url page .. but seems you need to alter your metas or the robot.txt ( which curiously I cannot get at this morning, my techy is coming back to us on that one)
I have been told many times that our site is the authority in our sector and this backed up by our solid positioning that has been sustained for 18 months for many key terms.
How why what? thats me out of a job on monday unless i can get an answer to this
Your help please to try and understand what may have happened
Like yours, this is a site selling a particular product through ecommerce, no iffy SEO techniques of any kind. We are in DMOZ and have a fairly good supply of inbound links.
On Wednesday the entire site, which is 2+ years old and has historically ranked well in Google, was entirely de-indexed. The site: operator returns the dreaded "Your search . . . did not match any documents." Google Sitemaps confirms that we have no pages indexed, of approximately 100 that have been well-indexed for quite some time. We showed up typically at #1 or #2 for most of our products, which are a somewhat niche product.
The odd thing is that through Google Analytics we see that a few searches are still showing us up on Google; occasionally if you search for the domain name it returns some results from the cache. Also through Google Sitemaps, you can still view the cache. We hope this shows that things will come back, but of course it may show that not everything has quite disappeared.
No major changes were made to the site at any time. The only change was that a few hours before the site disappeared, we deleted our AdWords program on this site, intending to replace it with a new one. Probably coincidence, though--I'm not particularly conspiracy-minded.
Anyway, we plan to wait for a while before pestering Google, assuming this is a bug.
If anyone has any thoughts, we'd appreciate it. We haven't quite started tearing our clothes and dumping ashes on ourselves, though.
Thanks for the link checked those IPs, also it really is every datacentre it has gone full stop?
The .co.uk has never been a site always been a redirect? no back links to it or pr either ..
we have all worked all day and are tearing our hair out now!
Have an IP linked to the hack day both b4 on on the old server and 404' s whilst moving on the new and a really good rummage round after back live and yet again vigerous activity last few days .. but caught it live on our metrics searching catch results and have grabbed the screen images as proof ... maybes something in that especially as the queries today were all google ranking ones agianst our terms ...checking the cache to see if the .com was there and cache of other .com pages in the indexed that still rank ...
all very scary .. job on the line .. how this has happened i do not know .. i wish i had the answer .. we have traced the ip i grabbed doing the searches and have the ISP any suggestions - how to get it investigated as the activity from the source is more than iffy i cannot disclose too much as domain name is not allowed
thanks for insight so far
From what i have researched the index no follow meta must have been added been added to the hijacked page and then the hijacker has gone to [services.google.com:8882...] and submitted an urgent removal request. our logs show a visits from the control agent so I am pretty sure thats whats happened I also have the logs of the ip that i caught searching for meta and robot.txts.
What the heck can i do to remedy this?
We are a very busy site with 2 new agressive competitors in our space, both of which tried to buy us i may add and when our clients log on on monday thats all our rankings gone - don't know what to tell people or how to resolve this. We will be going to the police with the collated evidence that matches the hack we suffered and also this incident it should be covered under the computer misuse act. I have an ip address and the ISP so thats a start and activity to back it up.
Any contacts at google worth a try? file a reinclusion for the homepage? redirect the .com to the .co.uk? (would that work if we did it quick enough)
What an absolute nightmare how could someone destroy your livehood like that and jepordise a team of 7 dedicate staff who lets faceit may not have jobs next week myself included ppc for our traffic levels and terms would cost circa 50 -60k per month and that is just not viable.
is it possible for a competitor to somehow have your page removed
Yes, by hacking your robots.txt file so it blocks the site and then quickly submitting a removal request to Google before you catch it -- similar to the events you now seem to have tracked down. Very scary indeed.
From what I've heard there is little hope for getting around the 6 month exclusion -- but I would still report it to Google anyway. And certainly, I would also see what you can do with the alternate domain. Good luck on this.
It does sound like an event for the legal authorities. Glad to hear you are going that route.
Next steps anyone greatly recieved
[edited by: JudgeJeffries at 8:46 am (utc) on Oct. 15, 2006]
If you catch it quickly there is hope that Google will not drop all your pages. You can try re inclusion - but this didn't work for us - we were gone for 180 days.
In terms of legal recourse you need to examine the log file activity to try and understand how this happened and supply it as evidence to the legal folks -
- but all of that doesn't make up for the fact that you must be vigilant with your security - there's a lot of bad folks out there focused on this type of infiltration and disruption - sadly.
[edited by: SEOPTI at 10:39 pm (utc) on Oct. 15, 2006]
Surely if you can absolutely prove that it is malicious there must be some redress on this our site is 3 years old and had top organic positioning, all of the other pages surely will fade away also as google will not be indexing the site, what the hell do we tell our clients?
How do you cpontact google in this matters is there a help page of guidance.
As i see it the site is runied a 180 day exclusion will effectively sandbox it again and it will have lost its pr no doubt by that time.
I operate in a very competitive setor and i know that the new entrants in our sector are finding it tough to break through as our client are telling us so all sounds very convient that we should be slammed like this
is there any googleguidance or help page to get assistance?
please post if you can give us any assistance at all
Many thanks
