Strange observation: my meta description showing in serps for other site

[epmaniac]

Hi,

On 6th if this month, my main website which had invented a niche ahd had been dominant in it vanished from serp (not delisted)

Few weeks ago a scrapper had scrapped all of my titles and had started few websites using just my titles (empty pages)

His websites are enjoying now top positions while I am now nowhere to be seen for the terms for which I was Number 1 since my website started.

I today noticed a strange thing.

The scrapper site has no content on pages, but when I was searching for the terms on google, he pages were showing (my scrapped description in SERP) but when I opened his pages, and viewed source, no meta description tag was even present..

This really boggles my mind, as google had already rejected my DMCA requests... but how come his pages are showing my meta description in serp when in pages sources they arent even there!

[Andy Langton]

Sounds like it's possible it may be a 'hijack' of listings. Have a read through this thread and see if it applies to your situation:

Google's 302 Redirect Problem
[webmasterworld.com...]

[epmaniac]

No there is no hijacking... but how come his pages are showing meta description when in source that content is not even there

[Robert Charlton]

Are these possibly cloaked for Googlebot?

[netmeg]

Yes they are. I had the same thing going on for one of my sites, where I'd see these fake sites in the SERPs with MY meta descriptions, and I'd go to the page and it was either some virus scam or else a parked page designed to look like a Google (or other search engine) results page. Looking at the source, my description didn't show up. They also took my titles. These were not outranking me, but they were showing up high enough for some long tail searches, to the point where I was worried some of my users would be confused and click on the wrong things. It was some kind of crap network of sites originating overseas, and I made enough of a stink about it that eventually I was contacted by Google for details, and shortly thereafter they disappeared. Google doesn't like to look stupid.

These are definitely a scourge, and it's bad enough that they exist, but they shouldn't be outranking you. If they are, then I suspect it's a separate issue.

[epmaniac]

how did google contact you?

[netmeg]

In that case, I was DM'd on twitter by Matt. But bear in mind, this was a case where there was a growing network of these crap sites; I was finding 30 to 50 new sites a day. If it had just been one site, I don't expect Google would have noticed.