Search for domain name only shows up with omitted results included

[proboscis]

I have a website that was pandalized feb 2011 then later received a negative fifty penalty (no results including a search for the domain name showed up before page 5).

I recently nofollowed most of the site leaving only pages with new original information and I'm slowly re-adding pages as I update them.

No improvement, in fact now instead of a search for the domain name showing up on page 5 it now does not show up at all unless I click "repeat the search with the omitted results included" then is shows up on page 6.

So what does it mean?

[lucy24]

It means: Hmm. Normally the "omitted results included" line refers to very similar pages from the same site. They tend to be shown in batches: "See? We said they were very similar." (I'm speaking here as a search-engine user who occasionally meets the same line-- and most of the time it's perfectly true. The new pages are almost identical.)

You don't have someone scraping your site do you? Take a closer look at those first five pages and see if anything looks familiar.

[phranque]

have you tested your robots.txt file?
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=156449 [support.google.com]

are your page titles unique?

[proboscis]

You don't have someone scraping your site do you?

Yeah, the first result is a myspace page that copied text from multiple pages of my site. I tried to have Google remove the page but they said no.

I assume they said no because the myspace page copied the text years ago and I have since rewritten mine so it's not an exact copy anymore, just very similar...I don't know.

They also use my domain name as their username.

[linkbuildr]

I had the same thing happen to a client just after the first week of Feb where a couple sites scraped 2/3rds of our content and we ended up in the omitted results and slammed back 5 pages...my thread is here to if it helps to see symptoms [webmasterworld.com...]

[proboscis]

Thanks, I'll go read that.

Also, I forgot I can try to have myspace actually remove the page instead of Google. I'll try first for the copied text then maybe for trademark infringement since they're using my company name as a username.

Thanks everyone, wish me luck.

[linkbuildr]

good luck and keep us updated!