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Normally the site grows at a tempo of 200 to 500 pages a month indexed by Google and others ... but since about 1-week I noticed that my site was loosing about
5,000 to 10,000 pages a week in the Google Index.
At first I simply presumed that this was the unpredictable Google flux, until yesterday, the main index-page from www.widget.com disappeared completely our of the Google index.
The index-page was always in the top-3 position for our main topics, aka keywords.
I tried all the techniques to find my index page, such as: allinurl:, site:, direct link etc ... etc, but the index page has simply vanished from the Google index
As a last resource I took a special chunk of text, which can only belong to my index-page: "company name own name town postcode" (which is a sentence of 9
words), from my index page and searched for this in Google.
My index page did not show up, but instead 2 other pages from other sites showed up as having the this information on their page.
Lets call them:
www.foo1.net and www.foo2.net
Wanting to know what my "company text" was doing on those pages I clicked on:
www.foo1.com/mykeyword/www-widget-com.html
(with mykeyword being my site's main topic)
The page could not load and the message:
"The page cannot be displayed"
was displayed in my browser window
Still wanting to know what was going on, I clicked " Cached" on the Google serps ... AND YES ... there was my index-page as fresh as it could be, updated only yesterday by Google himself (I have a daily date on the page).
Thinking that foo was using a 301 or 302 redirect, I used the "Check Headers Tool" from
webmasterworld only to get a code 200 for my index-page on this other site.
So, foo is using a Meta-redirect ... very fast I made a little robot in perl using LWP and adding a little code that would recognized any kind of redirect.
Fetched the page, but again got a code 200 with no redirects at all.
Thinking the site of foo was up again I tried again to load the page and foo's page with IE, netscape and Opera but always got:
"The page cannot be displayed"
Tried it a couple of times with the same result: LWP can fetch the page but browsers can not load any of the pages from foo's site.
Wanting to know more I typed in Google:
"site:www.foo1.com"
to get a huge load of pages listed, all constructed in the same way, such as:
www.foo1.com/some-important-keyword/www-some-good-site-com.html
Also I found some more of my own best ranking pages in this list and after checking the Google index all of those pages from my site has disappeared from the Google index.
None of all the pages found using "site:www.foo1.com" can be loaded with a browser but they can all be fetched with LWP and all of those pages are cached in their original form in the Google-Cache under the Cache-Link of foo
I have send an email to Google about this and am still waiting for a responds.
First of all, the sites that now have a link in google have been REPLACED by my site. They are in the same positions that my site enjoyed before the meta refreshes were put in place. My site has disappeared in the SERPS except for when doing a search for the title, in which my site is #1 and the offending site is #2. So we are not talking about just the throes of page rank, but the end result of what the meta refreshes have caused.
Next is the fact that even after the meta refreshes have been removed, at least in my case, the links seem to stay in place and a 302 redirect now goes to the home page of the offending site. This most assuredly is a problem. The user does not even get to the site they wish to go to! This seems to be in direct conflict as to what google is all about, relevant SERPs.
I could see maybe my site going down a notch or two, but to disappear altogether is a problem wouldn't you think?
Remember, the site is gone, the meta refreshes and the redirects remain. THAT is the problem.
As for DCMA, you are probably right. I don't know if there is a recourse, but I am going to try my darnedest to make the effort. As far as I can tell after reading the DCMA pages and such, posting here is my only recourse. Emailing to google seems to be falling on deaf ears, and quite frankly, I don't know if my emails are even being read. At least in the past, I would get some sort of acknowledgement that my email has been received. But now there is nothing. It's a big black hole.
So here I am posting the problems and hoping someone at the G will read this and take notice. So, far as I can tell, I have no other recourse.
Sure I could spam the site back, try to do funky stuff to my site to get back at these offending sites, but that is not the way I do things. I believe this will ultimately be fixed, it's just going to take some time.
And you're right, the offending site may not even know they are doing this, but that still does not make it right, nor should something as simple as adding a meta refresh to a blank page totally take a site out of the SERPs. THAT is what I am talking about.
I guess maybe I am emotional. But come on Google, let's get it fixed!
The 302 redirects I am talking about have only been in place for a couple of weeks. When I found the meta refreshes, I deleted the sites which now created the 302s.
I am going to have to wait to see if the 302s disappear. What I am worried about is whether or not my site will disappear with them.
Google does not owe us a living
No, but they do have a responsibility to not deliver stolen goods, which is what they are doing in this case. Those hijacking sites wouldn't be found by users, (essentially wouldn't exist), without the infrastructure that G and the other SE's created and maintain.
How anyone can say that this nonsense isn't criminal, (with Google and the others merely innocent third-parties), is beyond me.
getting the hosting company to disable the offending site
... which is interesting. It demonstrates how "quality control" on the web could be introduced more locally (and more manageably) by hosting providers. And then Google and other reputable search engines could move to index sites only from those hosts who are able to show that they maintain a standard.
I'm not saying this is a good or a bad thing, but that it is a mechanism. Some might see it as a sinister move towards web censorship.
Has anyone seen an internal Meta Refresh acting like a 302?
Eg: site1.com/bla.html => site1.com/blabla.html
Second - there is so much more going on here that meets the eye. There is an issue here, but throwing out spam reports doesn't help any one.
I tell ever one to keep a very skeptical eye to the so called "facts" here - they are not at all what they seem to be.
... trying to get to the bottom of it. In the mean time, leave the side topic stuff, the post count padding, and the pure off topic messages for foo.
Google has the legal responsibility to take action on that DMCA claim. When you have filed the DMCA with Google, they will contact the other website owner. If the other website owner claims that the content belongs to them and not you, Google will have little choice but to leave the page in its cache.
If the other website owner does not respond, which I think in the above cases mentionnned, they may not, Google will remove these pages from their cache.
Sticky me if you have any advice or if you need cached and dated examples for any class actions.
If someone wanted to get Google's attention on this could they hijack Google's homepage using the same tactic?
Just a thought.
