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Last year a good-hearted person bought a related domain name and used a 100% frameset page to frame the original site. Now all of a sudden, #1 on Yahoo is that new domain with the frameset - and the original page is gone, totally gone from the SERPs. The title and content in the new listing are taken from the 'deposed' domain - and there IS no content on the framing domain at any rate, just a frameset.
It's very much like that redirect trick for stealing traffic on Google, but here it's using a frameset. So what is going on with Yahoo here? Has anyone else tripped over this?
Luckily for my client this is not a hostile relationship with the domain owner. In fact, he's a supporter trying to do good and he just transferred the domain name over to the not-for-profit. We took it offline, hoping that Yahoo will sort this all out relatively quickly.
What does everyone else think? Would a 301 make more sense here? Or is the Yahoo backend still such a tangle that we just can't tell?
No, I don't think so. I can't afford to generate even the appearance of games with the parent domain. It's been firmly established since the earliest days of the web. And eventually there is the chance of developing this newly acquired domain as well if it doesn't end up looking contaminated.
What we want to see is the original domain, online for 9 years, get back where it belongs. The more I think about it, parking this interloper domain seems like the fastest route to that goal. howevfer, any and all recommmendations are welcome.
[added] I will comment on this one though...
But then I thought about what that might do in Google - domains with 301's have been known to replace the target domain over there.
I've not experienced any issues with 301s and Google. I think a lot of the issues we see here pertaining to 301s are related to how they are set up, many incorrectly once the server headers are checked.
In a word, yes. And you dont need a frameset to confuse Y! enough to replace a legit url.
If one domain framing another means Yahoo might replace the target domain with the framing domain, then they've got a wide open door for nasty traffic stealing games between competitors. To say nothing of the chaos with big sites that routinely frame linked sites.
Thankfully in this case it is not a competitor, but I hope Yahoo straightens up.
But if the framing/redirecting domain replaces their framing or redirecting URL with another content page, things change. Until the next search engine update, a click on your content on the SERP, where you are ranked well because your site acquired the rank honorably, goes to their new content.
Even with a redirect, this is a pretty bogus area and the search engines really should address it so the exploit cannot happen. But to work essentially the same thing with a frameset? There's danged little excuse for it that I can see.
Framed content should never be considered on-page content by a search engine. And in this case, the content is one link further than the actual page that's being framed. That's doubly negligent, in my opinion.
This is a short term game and I haven't seen it working with frames for a while. The redirect game, however... that is a sad, long-term issue, and still not fixed. I sometimes wonder if it ever will be.
What was the status of these two sites in Google before you took the copy down? Did Google ever rank the copy?
No. If you did that, you would tell the SE bots that "wrong-domain.org" is now located at "righ-domain.org" ... which is wrong, and not what you want.
I'd recommend something as old-fashioned and boring as a straight text link. No meta-redirects, no 301's, no content, just a plain old text link and no more (on page).
...from the page that had the frameset of course. As in:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<html><head>
<title>No content here</title>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow">
</head><body>
<a href="right-domain.org">Right anchor text, eg. site name</a>
</body></html>
Note blue words. Also, it doesn't really have to validate (doctype stuff), but why not ;)
I've given up and assume the old non-existent pages will still be in Y! in 2020
According to the Mayan calendar, Yahoo will remove those pages in December 2012.
>> Y! in 2020
2020?..Assuming that Y! will survive for another 15 years and search as we know, would still exist :)
LMAO :)
However, the original domain did not yet re-appear.
Oh, well. At least the SERPs at MSN never showed the confusion. They just show a 20 month old version of the page! Even their "new" beta shows the 20 month old version.
