Thursday, September 25th, 2008
This is a follow up post to my “Sudden Drop In Google Ranking post.
This morning, I checked the ranking of the website in question. To my surprise, the site had again ranked number 4 in the Google Search Engine Results. This was most definitely good news. In fact, all key phrases now ranked on page one of the Google SERPs.
I can only hope this persists. So, what did we do? Here is a short list:
- Noticed the website had dropped in Google ranking.
- Took a unique phrase from the website homepage and searched Google using quotes, “like this.”
- Found a direct copy of the website and discovered it had been “Proxy Hijacked.”
- Found IP address of website that Proxy Hijacked our website and blocked it using the .htaccess file.
- Submitted a “Reconsideration Request” to Google.
After about a week and a half, our website had regained its ranking in Google.
I read a long article about Proxy Hijacking and it mentioned that Google had fixed the problem. If this was the case with my friend’s website, this certainly isn’t true. While I can not be totally sure Proxy Hijacking caused this case of Google ranking loss, the facts seem to lead down this path.
What is my advice to you? Check either Google or Copyscape once a month to see if someone has taken text or Proxy Hijacked your website.
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Tuesday, September 16th, 2008
Do you remember my article from yesterday about the sudden drop in Google search ranking for my friend’s website? Well, I just can’t stop thinking about it.
From what I have been reading, it seems as though my conclusion may be correct. At least I am hoping it is. If I ever conclude anything semi-concrete while thinking about Google, it’s a good day for me.
Ok, I found this very helpful and thorough website that pretty much described the exact problem my friend is having. It’s titled “Google Proxy Hijacking” and tells the whole story.
Here is what struck me as I think about this some more.
- My friend’s website has been live since 2004.
- The site seemed to be in the Google sandbox for the entire 4 years.
- For his most competitive keywords, he was ranking past page 20 on Google.
- About two months ago, he made some changes to the homepage copy as well as an HTML overhaul.
- About a month after that, the site ranked number 3 for his most competitive keywords.
- The site ranked on page 1 of Google for about a month.
- The site now sits at page 25 for its most competitive keywords.
Here is my theory. I think the website has been proxy hijacked for a number of years. This is what caused the poor rankings for such a long time. When the homepage text and HTML changes were made about 2 months ago, Google visited the site and found it unique. Google ranked the site well, due to this new unique content. During the month, Google noticed the proxy website was now a duplicate of my friend’s website once again and dropped the website’s ranking.
Does that make sense? From what I read on the website I linked to, it does.
Here are the similarities with what we are experiencing and what the author wrote on the other website:
- My friend’s website has never been banned.
- We did a quoted Google search for supposedly unique content on my friend’s website and a proxy website showed in the search results.
- The proxy URL looked like this: proxysite.com/cgi-bin/pxy/nph-pxy.pl/000010A/http/www.friendssite.com/
- The proxy site was an exact duplicate of my friend’s website.
Now, I am not sure if this is what caused my friends ranking to drop, but all the factors are there. The keywords we are talking about are very competitive, but the fact that his site showed so well in the search results for a month shows me that the potential is there.
I would appreciate your thoughts on this.
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Monday, September 15th, 2008
A colleague of mine gave me a call yesterday morning with some rather upsetting news. Apparently, one of his websites took a plunge in its Google Ranking. He wanted to know what could cause such a sudden drop in Google Ranking like this.
I really didn’t have an answer for him. The site has been alive (but in the Google Sandbox) for about four years. It always struck me as strange that the site was sandboxed for such a long time. It literally took four years to come from page 30 in the Google Rankings to page one. Suddenly, last month, the website appeared on page one for its most prime keywords. Now, this wasn’t a gradual change in ranking, it was a huge jump.
The website doesn’t appear to have anything wrong with it. I gave the entire site a once over. I checked the typical meta information and linking structure and found nothing wrong. The website really hasn’t changed in months, besides the content, so it led me to believe there are outside forces at work.
The question I have is, “Why would a website, with a poor ranking, suddenly rank number five on Google one month and then fall back to page 24 the next month?”
I tried to get some information out of my friend. The only thing major he did in the past few weeks is to add a custom 404 or Not Found error message. I checked the 404 page to make sure the headers were correct and not giving 200 results. They error 404 pages were fine.
Then, I went over to Copyscape to see if there were any copies of his homepage. I have heard this can cause a sudden drop in Google rankings. I did find a proxy website that had almost his entire website cached and was trying to pull it off as its own. This wasn’t a typical proxy server trying to speed up the internet. This was something else…more like an intercept proxy.
I looked in the log files to find the IP address of this proxy website. I found it and blocked the IP address in his .htaccess file and then checked the proxy website again. His website no longer showed and was replaced by the Red Hat error page instead.
We will have to give this a few weeks to see if anything changes. I am now thinking that is something does change (for the better), this may have been what was causing the extremely long Google Sandbox issue as well.
If you have any further suggestions, please let me know via comment.
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