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I had a quick search in google for my home page and to my horror it is linking to another site which then redirects to my site.
Its got my title and description but a totally different URL to some directory.
What should I do?
Java
Bit difficult to explain, when you look at the google cache page for my home page its a totally different web address but my home page HTML with all the graphics missing, as its trying to get them from the other site. All the other pages are fine just the home page
You might want to check if the other site has framed your page, or if this is the infamous 302-redirect page-jacking exploit [google.com] - where the other site has a 302-redirect in place that leads to your site.
Jim
I've sent you the URL GoogleGuy
I've addred my URL to my profile just check the cached page on Google and look at the URL in the top.
They have nothing to do with us
Steve
That happened to one of my sites for a few days too. It was back around Florida I think. After a few days it went away and everything was back to normal. Hope it goes that way for you too.
1) when a website uses frames to display another
2) when a website uses 30X to redirect to another (and some conditions are met)
3) when a website uses a "Location:" header or similar to redirect links (this is often similar to a 302)
4) when a webmaster points his DNS for one domain to another
5) when a website uses internal redirects to display another
6) when a webmaster saves a page from one website and uploads it to another
Eg. in all cases involving redirects, as well as mirroring and copying. Only cases 4,5,6 should give this result, the first three should not. In case 2, if it is a 301, the problem will usually dissappear in a month or so - this is following the normal update cycle.
I believe this case is either a (1) or a (5).
So, there is a problem with frames, 302's, and link redirect scripts (usually click trackers). As conventional wisdom suggests that you should use a 302 if you want to pass on PR with your links, this problem is quite widespread i believe.
In most cases, these wrong URLs are buried deep down in the SERPS, which is why not many reports surface. However, in some special cases they will trump the original website and take over the ranking of the target. There are a few flavours but i will not post details here (i will not hand over the recipe in stickies either, just forget it).
As the pages are identical, doing this will not benefit the page-jacker. It will only harm the target (but this might be considered a benefit by some, of course). Oh, i should add that it's very probable that this is unintentional - eg. that the webmaster behind the "offending" site doesn't have bad intentions, or indeed that (s)he doesn't know what's happening (although cases (1) and (5) do imply an intent to copy or mirror, they do not imply an intent to kill your site, and they usually do not lead to this effect). It's simply a Google bug, albeit a very annoying one.
I appreciate your input. As in another thread very few of the seniors around here will say anything about this and that is very bothersome to me. This type thread you would think would be the leader item. But, nobody either wants to admit it is happening, or wants to give ideas or worse wants to give away secrets. I hope it is more the first two than the latter. I hope GoogleGuy gets into this one, there is a lot of "meat" in there I think and it looks to have the potential to be a huge problem for alot of very honest webmasters with hard built traffic.
<added> jd... that link brings it all back. Thanks.</added>
On my sites, I use a fairly common content management system. One section of the site is for people to submit their sites to a directory. The links in that directory are fed through a redirection script so that I can count the number of hits - it's a common link indexing module in php - nothing fancy.
Someone submitted their link to my site, and I added it, not thinking anything of it. A few weeks later, I get an angry email (understandable) saying that their top listing is now gone and in place of it is the site I manage redirecting to their site - they asked me to remove their listing. This is where the fun really begins.
I remove them from my directory, but the URL still shows as the top result in google for a particular search. So, now when someone searches for that search, they are taken to my redirection script. Since the particular site is no longer found, they are sent to my home page - which then has several competitors of this other person's site. Now I got another angry email (understandably).
I then contacted google through their URL removal tool - this was not helpful. They suggested I add robots.txt exclusion rules - I don't have much experience with robots.txt files, but can I exclude a specific php URL with 2 paramaters? Even so, I would have to wait for Google to spider the site again before it would take effect, right?
Ultimately, I just added the site back to my directory and now the top listing redirects to this person's site again. Hopefully they won't lose their page rank like the person who started this thread, but it was the best option I could find. I also figure that the destination site will be back to first when Google does their next update (any day now?)
I appreciate all the comments you have made. This
site has been up for about 5 years now and I have never had any problems. Unfortunately since this occured I have lost about 90% of my traffic and alot of sales. GoogleGuy has contacted me and taken all the details, hopefully the problem with rectify its self soon.
What I would like to know is how this could have happened. Its taken me 5 years to build upto a PR7 site and then overnight its wiped out to PR0.
If I was a bigger business with staff and more overheads this could have wiped me out.
Maybe its time to think more about AdWords than trying to play the Google game of Roulette.
Steve
This, afaik, is very bad advice. It will not remove the problem only make it worse, as (if you do that) Googlebot will not spider the link and hence it will not be able to correct the problem.
In stead, if you wish to remove the link, you should make it generate a blank html-page with the meta tag:
<meta name="robots" content="noindex">This will remove the link (eg. page) from the index, but Googlebot needs to be able to spider it and see that tag, this is a must.
Robots meta tag: [robotstxt.org...]
Googlebot: [googlebot.com...]
>> It may happen in these cases:
(7) When using "meta refresh": [webmasterworld.com...]
Just thought I would give you an update. My site is still pointing to the rogue URL in Google. Google sent me an email letting me know it was a duplicate page. (Sure difficult to work that one out).
I'm not sure what to do next. I can't get in contact with the rogue site webmaster. How can I get the URL removed from Google and my own URL back in its place.
Any help or ideas would be appreciated
Thanks
Steve
Digital Millennium Copyright Act: [google.com...]
