site keyword stuffing my domain name, google says nowt can do

[Frank_Rizzo]

A certain site is using a keyword generator thing for stuffing pages with keywords.

I'm a bit annoyed (or should that be flattered) that they have used my domain name in the list of keywords. Thus, if you search for my domain name without the www. and .co.uk you get dozens of pages of the rogue site.

I wrote to the webmaster asking him to stop doing this. He replied:

"These listings must be at least a year old and I don't have any control over what Google has in their cache, so you would really need to contact them directly if you want them removed from their database. I took the pages offline a *long* time ago and all I'm using on the domain now is
an .htaccess redirect with no keyword generator tied in at all."

Ok, so I mail [e-mail] and they reply:

"Thank you for your note. We do not have cached copies of the pages provided in your link. Our crawler is not reading these sites as dead links because they do not result in a 404 error. You may want to let the webmaster know that Google follows standard web protocol in not crawling
sites that have specific instructions in their robots.txt files."

So who's right and who is wrong? My domain name is wrongly being used to entice punters to another site and no one wants to take any action to stop it!

[JayC]

So who's right and who is wrong?

Have you confirmed that what the webmaster says is correct: that the current version of those pages doesn't contain those keywords? If you view source on those pages, are the keywords there?

And Google says they don't have cached versions of those pages... have you confirmed that? If you do the query that returns them and click on "cached," are they there?

How important is it anyway? If people search for your domain name, they're probably looking for your site -- and you should rank better for that query than these guys. I suppose it's disconcerting to see those listings, but it really doesn't seem likely that it's hurting your traffic much if at all. Keyword queries are much more important than those for your domain name.

[Frank_Rizzo]

I just think its dirty tricks! He's also using domain names of trademarked industry companies. Here's some of the ones that concern me:

[google.co.uk...]

So who needs to resolve this? The webmaster says he doesn't have those pages, and anyway, they redirect to a new site. Google says that they don't cache it.

So where are the pages being held? Who's responsibility is it to delete them?

[Crazy_Fool]

if he's using your (trademarked) name to gain traffic, then he's passing off. likewise with other trademarked names.
step 1 - collect the evidence, past and present
step 2 - notify the other companies involved
step 3 - go see a lawyer
step 4 - go to court

[JayC]

Well, my theory is this: the pages were changed very recently -- after the most recent deep crawl. The webmaster told you he did it a couple of years ago to spin the blame onto Google. So I'd expect it to clear up with the next update, when the old indexed pages are replaced by the current versions.

And with Google's dislike of redirects the whole thing might come out in your favor anyway.

[Frank_Rizzo]

Well its still happening.

Google are saying there is nothing they can do about it: "it would dissapear after the next update", but it hasn't. The webmaster says he has done all he can: "the pages were changed a year ago and its a google cache problem".

So what do I do now? Time to beat him at his own game?

How is he doing it? Cloaking?