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Our website has been very successful up until update florida, one of the best in our country in fact. Then it vanished entirely never ever ever to be found again it seems.
The bad news doesn't stop here. Our website has been found! The most unexplainable problem we and any other marketing companies have ever seen.
Our domain is listed in google as:
www.%20ourdomain.com
The %20 causes the domain to point to a page cannot be displayed. We have wrote SEVERAL letters to google and recieved no help removing our domain to have their problem fixed and our website re-indexed. They seem to ignore our requests everytime. What seems even more odd is that noone can submit such a url, this had to have happened inside google manually. We would like to hear from other professionals why this happened and how.
Seems that if this is even possible to happen outside google, which we doubt, then there is a new way to
cause trouble for other website owners.
Who do we call when google will not respond to our complaints?
this had to have happened inside google manually
What? That they have a team of people typing in 8 billion URLs and they got yours wrong? Surely not!
What? That someone decided to edit your listing for the fun of it? Surely not!
Why would they spend time doing that?
Has anyone linked to you with a bad href?
DerekH
Apart from a duff backlink, you may find others with other ideas...
Watch this space...
The alternative possibilities would be odd indeed.
You cannot submit a domain name www.%20ourdomain.com
It doesnt resolve, you can try, however how would the bot even have a description? In the meta tags?
It wouldnt resolve.
Therefore its obvious it has been modified after it was crawled, otherwise there wouldnt be any listing.
Follow me?
I don't think it's obvious at all that it's been modified after it was crawled, and I'm pretty sure the bot doesn't have a description, despite your assertion it does.
I think rather than assert that someone inside Google has deliberately done this, I'd rather find a mechanism that we can understand, and then find a cure for. After all, I've wasted countless minutes now trying all the search engines I can think of to try to find one that lets me search for a single space between two words - I think that's key to finding how this has gone wrong.
Does anyone here have a very high PR page on which they're willing to put an HREF to a URL that has a space after the first dot? If you do, please do so - we should see that page appear in Google in 48 hours, and then at least we'll have a model for how the duff entry got there, but not a solution about how to find the site that's linking to our new members page so badly...
DerekH
Could it be someone being evil?
Whos the judge?
Click the link, see where it takes you to?
Even more odd it takes you to that exact url with %20 in it. Therefore I am ruling out a bad link somewhere.
My site has been missing from the index since July. When I search for allinurl:www.mysite.com I get:
[mysite.com%5Cmls%5Cmls.shtml...]
There is no description and clicking on the link leads nowhere.
allinurl:mysite.com (without the www) also yields:
[f-mysite.com...] also with no description and leading nowhere.
Explain your thoughts please...
As stupid as this may sound, it seems someone may of touched their database that shouldn't have?
The only way I can see this happening is by someone actually modifying the url in their database, and not removing it.
It seems it will not crawl our site while it is in this error state, their bots likely go to www.20%domain.com instead of www.domain.com .
That would explain more about why our site is not getting crawled.
I didn't notice these %Cmls thingies until recently but they may have been there all along.
If we are going to advertise their site, and brand it with adsense, they should of at least crawled and advertised our website we felt.
Months later we find our domain listed in google as www.20%ourdomain.com and still not crawled.
Very, very few urls make it in to google through being submitted. As ciml said, someone linked to you with a bad URL. in their link, someowne accidently hit a space after the "." out of habit.
There is no conspiracy. After google fails to be able to fetch it several times, they will pull the listing.
Googlebot crawled about 30 pages yesterday alone.
Lets see someone hyperlink www.%20adomain.com and see what happens. Google wouldn't of added this I feel unless it resolved.
I think this is a more serious problem than what you guys think.
When I search for:
site:www.%20thedomain.com the link appears.
Someone made a mistake when they linked to your site.
Google put it in their list of sites to crawl.
When they fail, they will remove it from that list.
It has virtually no effect on anyone. There is no description, so there will be very few clicks on the link.
You are already upset at google, so you are looking for excuses to blame them.
So, what it comes down to for just about everyone else in the universe is that it is a non-issue. Yeah, Google should fix it, but they have bigger concerns.
I would like to see a rational explanation from google as to how yours and my %20 and %Cmls variants appear in their results. They state pretty clearly that there is (almost) nothing that a competitor can do to damage your ranking.
So if the source of the problem did not originate with a competitor, and presumably is not of our making, then it seems logical to conclude that there is a glitch in G's system.
As BigDave Asked: How do these listing damage your rankings?
I believe it has "Replaced" our website.
this wierd %Cmls thing is the only trace (on Google) that my site exists... other than many links
Its obvious if it was in fact done by mistake within google, then this is entirely why the site is never crawled by google now. This only makes sense, no other explanations make me believe differently.
This *WAS NOT* done within google. Someone linked to you with a broken URL.
Google does not even recognise it as being your site. Just like aexample.com is different than example.com
This has been reported before and people have actually found the link causing the problem. It never replaced any other URL, it was always an addition.
As BigDave Asked: How do these listing damage your rankings?I believe it has "Replaced" our website.
Then you believe wrong. It certainly sounds like google has some sort of issue with your site, and if it is some sort of banning, then this link would never have appeared because they would have recognised it as beiing from the site that they do not like.
Instead of blaming google, why don't you try and find the site that links to you the wrong way and get them to fix it. Your website is important to you, it is not important to Google. Who should do the work on fixing the problems with your listing?
BigDave is correct. More than likely a link with a space in the url.
Doing a search for inurl:domain.com brings up about 24,000 results and all my pages are supplimental but there are 5 listings like this below.
www.mysite.com%22%3E%3Cimg/
Similar pages
www.mysite.com%22%3Emysite/
Similar pages
www.mysite.com%5C%22/
Similar pages
www.mysite.com%5C/
Similar pages
www.mysite.com%22/
Similar pages
My home page shows only for a search for www.domain.com. It has no title or description in the listing. But my sub pages show everything and are all supplimental results?
There must be something wrong with google.
Perhaps G in error put a space in front of the domain as a computer glitch or it happened on your end somehow.
[edited by: rogerd at 2:13 pm (utc) on Dec. 5, 2004]
[edit reason] No URLs or pasted content, please... [/edit]
I presume someone manually typed it in wrong with the space on their end by accident.
I know for darn sure that it wasn't on our end. Just imagining the thoughts that this could be possible should be frightening to any online business certainly a wakeup call.
Bigdave your theory doesn't make sense to me. The urls would point to a domain at least I feel. The way the www.%20domain.com is ... I could see it being domain.com/index%20.html or something but not within the domain name itself.
Bigdave I would be delighted to see even 1 you can find out of 8,058,044,651 listings.
Google isn't into the practice of manually typing urls into the index.
>>>Bigdave your theory doesn't make sense to me
I have been through this myself, and the cause was hyperlinks pointing to the site with a space in the url. Don't dismiss this so easily, it is the most likely cause of the issue you are facing.
Bigdave I would be delighted to see even 1 you can find out of 8,058,044,651 listings.
Well, that is easy. look at the listing that caused you to post your complaint.
No one is saying that it was something that you did. Spend some time and actually read and think about what people are posting here. Someone, not google, and probably not you, linked to your site and hit a space bar after the period when they were typing in your URL. %20 is a space, as anyone with any experience on the web can tell you.
Do you have anyone that you work with, whose opinion you trust, that understands programming? You can ask them what happens to a space when it gets "URL encoded".
Then show them the listing, and ask if that could have happened if someone put up a bad link to your site with a space in it.
If you are not willing to take advice from people that have a better understanding of the issues than you do, it is no wonder that you have not made it back into the index aftter florida even though most others have.
1) your site got dropped from Google.
2) someone linked to your site with a space in the url by mistake.
These two items are not connected. You found 2) because you looked after 1) happened.
BigDave is correct. More than likely a link with a space in the url.
Totally agree.
32 is decimal for a 'space', 20 is hexadecimal (base 16). URLS use hexadecimal.
Look for the backlinks with a space before your domain name.
