Forum Moderators: phranque
He "removes" all the content from his homepage, or so it appears.
I decide to help out and put up a new webpage for the group elsewhere and it seems fine. HOWEVER-
I do a little search for a couple of terms and discover that the OLD webpages are STILL active, but the guy who ran them has "poisoned" them somehow. All the words show up in search engines and the source shows all the text, but all the browser shows is a BLANK page. He has apparently just inserted "comment" tags at the beginning of the body and the end.
<!--
body of text
-->
This means people searching for this group will end up finding the OLD webpages, but they will show up BLANK to their browser.
he has a robots.txt file that excludes ONLY ia-archiver, not any other search engine. what a jerk.
what, if anything can be done about this?
<!--
Anthing between the opening and closing tags of HTML comments is treated as markup.
-->So, what I think is happening is you are seeing the remanants of the previous site which has not been purged from the indexes yet. Yes, you can view the source and see all of the content between the comments tags, but the search engines don't.
Try contacting him and see if he'll redirect the traffic over to your new site. If not, don't worry about it. Those pages will drop from the index soon enough if there is no visible content to index.
I originally tried to get him to send me the maps and other graphics that were used and instead he sent a long rambling incoherent email about copyrights.
There are many other sites that link to this old page and
Google sees it as a valid URL but does not rank his page very high, perhaps because of the Markup tags. (?)
But Yahoo sees this site as # 4 when I use the same search terms.
plus it says: "here is the page with your search terms highlighted" and of course it just shows a Blank page. Odd.
So I guess Yahoo indexes Markup/Comment tags.
thanks for the help.
So I guess Yahoo indexes Markup/Comment tags.
No, I'm going to assume that he has a Yahoo! directory listing and what you are seeing is his title and description from that.
I just looked and yes indeed he DOES have a Yahoo directory listing! Its been there forever too (from 1996, that's forever...)
So you're saying that the old webmaster gave/sold this website to these people and then tried to "kill" the site? What makes you think that it was the old webmaster?
So you're saying that the old webmaster gave/sold this website to these people and then tried to "kill" the site? What makes you think that it was the old webmaster?
*sigh*
The OLD webmaster hosted their website on his Home Pages of his Personal Webspace provided by his ISP.
There was no charge. It was free. It's a Hobby website (local car enthusiasts...). Nothing for sale, no dues, nothing.
this worked well for many years.
The OLD webmaster had a disagreement of some sort with the folks and told them he would no longer have anything to do with their Hobby and/or dealing with the website. His Personal Webspace and UserID at his ISP is still ACTIVE though.
He is the only one controlling his Personal Web space at his ISP.
He responded to my email request for the old files and basically told me : "NO FILES 4 U".
So fine, I set them up a new website (free again, its my hobby too: see my UserID...)
Now I find that the OLD website that was on this guy's Personal Webspace is STILL showing up in Search results but with a BLANK page because ALL the text is still in the body, but he's put Markup/Comment tags around the Body. Really weird. And why would he put a Robots.txt file that ONLY excluded ia-archiver?
He's just doing it to mess with them. And I think that sux. or it blows, or something.
It's his address. You have no control over how search engines index or rank his address. Furthermore, you no rational rights to control how search engines index or rank his address. The Web doesn't work like that. It would be hopelessly broken if it did, because everyone would be trying to sabotage each other's sites instead of creating their own.
If you want to outrank him search results, concentrate on making your site better, and stop whining about his. The whining isn't going to get you anything.
Good luck in outperforming the nasty old webmaster
