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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.
The search engines need to fix this real soon ..
Webmaster@google.com has already responded to many of us and told us that it is working exactly as they want it to work and that we should shut up and leave them alone.
Yahoo responded to my note by banning my site from their index.
Have Dvorak, Cringely, Sullivan, or Bricklin written about this yet?
Apparently, you overlooked this plumsauce.This testing was all done within one domain.
guess i did, it's been a long thread to follow.
Of course, "reason" and "Google" are not synonymous so anything is worth trying I guess.
Kaled.
Why would changing the <base> tag have an effect?
The event that led to this idea is described in: [webmasterworld.com...]
To summarize quickly, Googlebot (possibly in a one-off glitch) clearly followed a 301 Location: redirect and left the base URI set to the domain that issued the redirect rather than the domain spelled out in the Location: header. A correct interpretation of the HTTP, HTML and RFC1808 standards? I'm skeptical, but of course, it's more interesting to know what's going to happen then to waste time trying to get Google to agree with my interpretation of what they should be doing.
IMO, it's entirely possible that Google believes these standards require it to assume that the cross-domain target of a redirect has the base URI of the source domain, hence leading it to "give" that content to the hijacker.
Why wonder whether Google might have decided to pay attention to the <base> element of the destination URL's HTML? Mainly because of 12.4.1 in the HTML 4.01 spec, which says the <base> element must be given priority over:
meta data discovered during a protocol interaction, such as an HTTP header
setting that <base> element is at least a handle that the hijackee can twist, so it seems worth a try.
I can't argue with that - if I were a victim, I'd try it.
Kaled.
