Wrong site title showing up on a "site:domain.com" search

[fred9989]

When I do a "site:mydomain.com" search on my domain (let's say mydomain.com), I get a title line and a description from someone else's site (let's say widget.com) showing above my url, thus:

Widget.com - Explore Widgets With Our Company
We have lots of experience in teaching people about widgets....
www.mydomain.com

My domain has nothing to do with widgets! On investigation, the URL "widget.com" has indeed got the above title and description. It's just that it's showing up above my URL in the search results. When I click on the top line of that entry, it goes to mydomain.com

I was top of the search results for the most obvious and popular search term related to mydomain.com for several years until last week when the index page dropped out of Google - the other pages of mydomain.com are still in the index.
I emailed my webhost and they replied as follows:
****************************************
[snip: this does not seem to be a DNS or hosting problem]
************************************
I would, as you can imagine, be grateful for any hints, advice, suggestions or leads.
Rod

[edited by: Receptional_Andy at 11:57 pm (utc) on Oct. 27, 2008]
[edit reason] No email excerpts, please, see ToS #9 [/edit]

[Robert Charlton]

This sounds similar to something called "302 hijacking", and it was essentially a problem that came about because of the way Google treated 302 redirects in links that incorporated intermediate pages that tracked traffic, using either meta refresh or 302 redirects to send the user to your page.

Use site search to look for [302 hijacking], [302 hijacks], etc to get a sense of what was happening. The problem would generally occur only when the linking page, in this case widgets.com, had a much higher PageRank than your page.

The "hijacking" part of the name was unfortunate, as these kinds of redirects are common in many directory and ad counting setups, and the "hijacking" was an unfortunate result of search engine indexing. It's been assumed for a while that the search engines (it wasn't only Google that had the problem) have fixed the issue.

You might want to see whether you've had an ad or link from widgets.com to your site. If the link is still live, get it removed. If an old link or ad, I'd report the problem to Google.

Has your index page dropped out of Google, or is it merely ranking with the widget.com title and description?

One PS to this... in 302 "hijacking," the title and description returned were generally yours, but the url displayed was that of the redirecting page... so this is not exactly the same problem.