Hi,
Recently a rogue site copied our contents and then managed to convince Google that they are the real site and we are the copy.
The result has been a disastrous decline in our Google ranking.
This is much like the old 302 redirect hijack I saw a lot of discussion of in 2005-2008. However what appears to be different is the fact that I cannot find any redirect or anything at all unusual in the copied site's code.
This makes the problem especially difficult to clean up. In the old 302 days (according to what I've read) you'd put in a request to remove the rogue page from Google's index. Just before doing so, you'd put a "noindex" metatag on your corresponding page.
Then immediately after filing the request you'd remove the "noindex" metatag from your page.
What happened (so the theory goes) is that google would go to the offending page with the redirect tag, which would point it to your original page. There it would confirm that there was a "noindex" listed there and go ahead and remove the rogue page.
However, with no visible evidence of a redirect, or any indication of where Google is getting the idea that the rogue page is in fact authentic, this strategy doesn't work. When I tried, Google simply rejected the request, saying there was no "nofollow" metatag found. Not surprising since Google obviously found no reason to redirect to my site to find it.
The old discussion regarding this problem is very useful which can be found at webmasterworld/forum30/28612[dot]htm
I've already sent in a spam report to Google and reported the problem on their Webmaster forums (Malware & hacked sites: "Google spidering rogue site as if it's mine") So far nothing has changed and I've received no response from anyone, Google or otherwise.
Though I've effectively written off the site at this point, I write this mostly as a precautionary tale: If this happens to you, all of your ambitions on Google will be destroyed overnight.
