Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Yesterday, while doing a search on Google for my page's keyphrase, I found my page title and meta description at #5. The URL was to a page on the niche-related directory site.
When I clicked on the link, though, I was redirected to the content page on my site.
This would seem to be a violation of Google's rules. But the site has been around forever.
Has anyone else seen something like this?
[edited by: tedster at 5:52 pm (utc) on Dec. 17, 2007]
Also, I checked on the PR of the site, and it's 0. Given the number of inbound links as well as the age of the site, I'm suspicious.
The only code I can find on the redirect page is this:
<meta http-equiv="Refresh" content="0; URL=http://www.mysite.com/my_keywords.html">
I'm wary of being penalized for being listed on a site that violates the rules.
I think it would be hard to Google to penalize all of the people that are listed in this directory for the redirect. There are at least a few issues with this worry;
1. If they penalized, you could submit your competition to get dinged.
2. The webmaster [you] may have submitted to their directory before the "forbidden" tactic was in place.
3. Anyone can submit a site to a directory or that directory could be out there scraping for websites.
I know it's bad to get into bad "neighborhoods" but I really doubt that something like this could constitute a bad neighborhood, especially if the directory is providing useful information to the users of Google.
I think the worse Google or anyone would do is devalue the link and remove the directory from their listings. They just can't go around with a hammer and beat up webmasters without some logic / way to protect the innocents.
Bottom line, I wouldn't sweat getting penalized.
Maybe they've got a copy of your page up on their site possibly?
The confirmation email from the directory site even mentions that anyone can list someone else's site, and provides a username and password to edit listings.
While it's nice getting first-page rankings so quickly, something about this just doesn't seem like it would pass Google's smell test. At the same time, though, the directory lists some of the most popular sites in my niche.
OK then, so they don't have a copy of your page that user agents other than Googlebot can see (but Googlebot can). Either that, or hijacking by meta-direct is happening now, like it was a while back.
And what's in it for them?
The only code I can find on the redirect page is this:<meta http-equiv="Refresh" content="0; URL=http://www.mysite.com/my_keywords.html">
This sounds exactly like way the meta-refresh and 302 "page-jacking" began. Here was my first sighting, which was a very early report....
Banner ad redirect-page indexed as mirror site by Google
Google getting overly aggressive in its indexing?
[webmasterworld.com...]
from August, 2003
What's bothering me here, though, is that Google is taking a meta refresh redirect page (from one domain) and assigning to it the title and content of the page it redirects to.
It took several years for Google to consider this a problem, and then some time to fix it. This is the first report I've heard of the problem recurring for several years now.
Generally, there was no malicious intent on the part of the linking site, and the term "hijacking" was an unfortunate one. It was a Google indexing bug. Let's hope it's very temporary this time.
you said this the site has been around for a while and you submitted the url to the directory the directory is just doing what you asked them to do.
Now the page is ranking your scared, I see nothing wrong with it we do redirects all the time to customer pages and sites with no problems in any search engine.
I can't understand why you are worried about this it is something else you wanted to happen other that this? Is your page the only page being redirected in such a manner?
If the site was trying to be sneaky I highly highly doubt it would have been around for such a long period of time.
Also, the redirecting site is getting the benefit that good ranking pages pass along to other pages on the same site. My site gets no such benefit.
And, if the site owner decides for some reason to delete my link, I instantly lose the ranking.
Short-term, it's nice to get ranked well quickly, but long term I see this as a problem.
If Google hasn't fixed this problem by now, it would be easy to hurt competitors' sites.
Does it make it right No but there is really nothing you or I can do about it but continue to work on your site to strengthen it.
One way is exactly what is happening now. I don't think it is anything done to hurt or steal the traffic just the directory even if it has a pr of 0 is still a stronger site and will out rank your own material.
But what can happen you could and possible will get some links from it this submitted url and that builds a stronger site that will soon be able to compete against the older domains.
I felt or feel the same way but I see now it is something I need to overcome through continued seo development of my site....
I'm trying to get some new product pages ranking quickly, so I'm looking for links. When adding new pages, I usually get them ranked highly very quickly, probably because of my site's seniority.
This redirect thing is new to me, though. I've never seen it in my niche.
As far as the destination page (in this case dickbaker's page), if it's already ranking, what will happen is that the url of the directory redirect page replaces the url of dickbaker's page in the serps... and those redirect urls are generally pretty ugly.
Usually also, if the directory already shows a result for the query affected, dickbaker's page would be moved up to be clustered under the directory's result.
The combination of clustering and the url display change... while it may give dickbaker's listing a higher position than it might have had otherwise... also confuses "ownership" of the page for the searcher, and, in my experience, generally results in a loss of traffic.
dickbaker, is this an accurate description of what you were seeing?
It would work work to inflate ad rates asked for, unless advertisers ask for specifics on pages; but in total it would give a very high number for site impressions if those search queries result in pageview data.
On their advertising page, they tout their PR4, but their site has been downgraded to PR0. Also, they tout 34,000 visitors a month, where my site gets nearly 300,000.
So, it could be that the site owner(s) is not being malicious, but just doesn't understand the implications.
If there's any upside to this for me, it's that I got out of the directory, while many, many of my competitors are in it. If the redirects result in duplicate content penalties for them, well...
$20 a month for advertisers? Are they using rel="nofollow"?
(They still may be using impressions in their sales pitch, nevertheless. I can't think of any other reason for the lameness.)
I found another redirect site.
I write articles about the niche for the site mentioned above, in addition to articles for a finance-related site I launched months ago. Like many authors, I write them to get links to my site.
Last night I was searching for my articles' titles, just to see what kind of distribution I was getting.
I found many sites that had published my articles. On one, the link looked proper, but when I clicked on it, it went to http*//www.somehijackersite.com/load-url.php?url_encoded=aHR0cDovL3d3dy5idXl5b3VyaG9tZWd1aWRlLmNvbQ==.
That link redirected to a page on my site. It was another meta refresh redirect.
When I get the time, I'm going to grab all of the URL's for these redirect sites and complain to Google. Don't know if it will help or not.
Between the redirects, and the sites publishing my articles but not having my copyright and site link (per terms of agreement), I'm really getting steamed.
[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 8:07 pm (utc) on Dec. 20, 2007]
[edit reason] disabled link [/edit]
