Site gets banned - Gets back in through a proxy

[johnnie]

Hi all,

I'm stumped. Today I got presented a very interesting case of a website recuperating from a Google penalty within a matter of days. Here's what happened:

- The site got banned and was no longer ranking for anything. Not even its own domain name.

- Since the site is a rather large affiliate, a call was made and the webmaster exclaimed "don't worry, I'll be back in by the end of the week".

- Two days later and he's back to number one. However, he's not ranking his original URL (which is banned), but a proxied version using the d'accord proxy server on appspot.com!

Note that the original URL is still functioning perfectly, so no 301s redirecting link value or anything of the sorts. It's just the proxied URL ranking first on a fairly competitive finance term.

I've tried visiting the site with GoogleBot as user agent and I believe he's not cloaking any 301 redirects, although he may be cloaking on an IP-basis. Note that Google still has the full original site cached (cache is dated before the ban).

Any ideas?

[indyank]

However, he's not ranking his original URL (which is banned), but a proxied version using the d'accord proxy server on appspot.com!

Does this mean that there are no links and no 301 redirects between the original site and the proxy site?

I have seen some people reporting this issue just before Panda. Their content was scraped and used on Google's proxy server and it ranked higher than the original.

This is a serious issue if google has not yet addressed this.I am already seeing a massive spike in people scraping entire sites. Several bots hit my sites regularly to scrape the pages.I also find these pages in full, on a few sites now.Panda seem to have increased the scraping activity on the web.

[edited by: indyank at 4:05 am (utc) on Apr 20, 2011]

[tangor]

I suggested something like this a week or so back... seeing it in the logs...

[webmasterworld.com...]

[tangor]

Vast majority of everything I do is whitelisting... ie., what I allow. I don't waste a lot of time putting out small fires. Most of it is commonsense. Suggest spending some time at the Search Engine forum...http://www.webmasterworld.com/search_engine_spiders/ A WEALTH of information.

[semseoanalyst]

For my case where one of our got pandalized...the main key phrase we stand top three spots for last three years and after panda we got placed at 25th position..reason? we have added fresh content's for years from industry expertise professor's and those who are positioning top three spots for the same key phrase..are using simple rss feed contents from other sites and just linking to them..."article from:"...........is this panda really giving good insights for identifying the best content's on the web?...Panda no way!..its a flop algorithm to some extend......sooner user satisfaction ratio will prove that..

[johnnie]

Does this mean that there are no links and no 301 redirects between the original site and the proxy site?

yes, at least not in plain view. Maybe the webmaster's using IP-based cloaking to serve up the 301 to googlebot, but that is very hard for me to detect.

[johnnie]

I still don't know how they did it. I do have an alternate theory though; they quickly bought their proxy in using link buying and prohibited yahoo from crawling the links. Maybe that works?

[deadsea]

About a year ago somebody set up an unauthorized proxy site of one of my sites. The proxy server was serving all of my pages on another domain. The proxy server was just rewriting the links, my logo, replacing my brand with their domain name, and replacing our ads with their ads.

Every time that I hit a page on their site, I saw a hit from their IP address in my logs to fetch the same page in real time from my server. We were able to shut the proxy down by blocking its ip address on our server.

The surprising thing to me was how well this simple setup was at ranking my content in Google. The proxy was outranking the main site fairly often. It had only been up for about a month before we caught on.