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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.
If anyone has had this happen to them, what is the effect if you add a 301 redirect to the end of this redirection chain? In other words, replace your hijacked page with a 301-Moved Permanently redirect to a copy of your page.
Geocities page =[meta refresh]> NoLongerActive.widget.com =[301]> www.widget.com
The above resulted in the Geocities page showing www.widget.com's title, description, cache, backlinks and PR. The real www.widget.com page was removed from Google and the most of my site was dropped in the same way Marcello described in post #1. I ended up 404ing NoLongerActive.widget.com which at least got www.widget.com back in Google but not the pages that were dropped.
E-mails to Google about the bug and the resulting penalty got me:
- 2 canned responses saying "we don't comment on site penalties"
- 1 canned response saying "we'll pass this on to our engineers"
- No reply when I asked for an update a month later (July)
This means there are still two parties left that can stop this abuse:
1. The offender.
2. The judge.
Contact the offender with the explicit instruction to remove all these refresh meta tags immediately.
If you don't get a response within let's say 1 business day, then take legal actions.
... wondering how fast Google will change its policy when the first lawsuits will be filed ;-)
It's their fault. You are allowed to redirect to a site with a 301 redirect or a meta refresh. It's your site and not google's and you don't copy anything from the other site.
the effect of a 302 is to cause Googlebot to index the URL of the page containing the 302 with the content of the page the 302 redirects to.
<?php
$location = 'ht*p://somesite.com/';
header('Location: ' . $location);
?>
The above returns a 302 also, from an url like ht*p://www.mysite.com/link.php?url=somepage. It is commonly (and innocently) used in php redirect scripts which sit in their own (normally unseen) file. I use it myself to help track outgoing clicks. Surely link.php isn't credited with the content of all the pages it links to?
A client's homepage disappeared, I have been trying to figure out why. There is one site that shows up when searching "client's company name" on google, which is a 302 redirect script (.cgi file). Could this be causing the problem, or does it only apply to meta refresh?
does it only apply to meta refresh?In the absence of proof to the contrary, assume that redirect methods other than METAs will also cause this problem.
This problem was first described with META redirects, but scumbags being scumbags, they will have experimented to see what else works.
It is likely that the META redirect is grouped for behavioural purposes with others. It is likely that the fault lies in the behaviour of the group rather than special case code for METAs.
Kaled.
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<script language="Javascript" src="http://theirsite.com/clients/script.aspx?campaignid=2915&websiteid=2237&scriptid=11868&subwebsiteid="></script>
<meta http-equiv='Refresh' content='0; url=http://www.mysite.com/index.html'>
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Both [theirsite.com...] and http://mysite.com are indexed and I can find both in searches, however, only when i click on "If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included." I can find both.
So pretty much the two pages are identical in google.
[edited by: DaveAtIFG at 6:54 pm (utc) on Sep. 11, 2004]
