Site Vanished, Indexed since 2001

[rxsites]

Late Saturday night, March 26, 2005, the website http://www.pharmacysources.com completely vanished from google. The site has been indexed in google since 2001 which was when the site was first developed. The site had about 50 - 60 pages indexed by google, but now has zero indexed. The site homepage had pr4 and the rest of the pages had pr3 or pr4, now all the sites pages have pr0.

The site had around 45 - 50 backlinks from high quality, reputable, and well established sites with good content that was relevant to that of pharmacysources.com and these sites also have high pr's, but all the backlinks are now gone. When a google search for link:http://www.pharmacysources.com is performed, the result is Your search - link:http://www.pharmacysources.com - did not match any documents. When a msn search for link:http://www.pharmacysources.com is performed, the result is, 1-10 of 931 containing link:http://www.pharmacysources.com. When a yahoo search for link:http://www.pharmacysources.com is performed, the result is, Results 1 - 10 of about 923 for link:http://www.pharmacysources.com. A google search for pharmacysources.com results in, Sorry no information is available for the URL pharmacysources.com, but if you click on the link that says, Find web pages that contain the term pharmacysources.com you get, Results 1 - 10 of about 8,420 for pharmacysources.+com.

Pharmacysources.com has been listed in dmoz since december 2001 or january 2002 and is still listed in dmoz in the category http://www.dmoz.org/Shopping/Health/...es_and_Guides/. The site was also listed in the google directory in http://directory.google.com/Top/Shop...es_and_Guides/ but is no longer listed, PharmacySources.com was the top listed site when you view as ranked by pagerank. Up until tuesday, you could still see in the google cache of this google directory page /resources_and_guides/ that had pharmacysources.com listed as the first site at the top of this google directory but the cache has now changed to the new version and the new cache of this directory has pharmacysources.com removed; I am not sure if you can look at older caches of the directory page or not to see pharmacysources.com listed. Does anybody know if you can look at old caches of gogle pages or does the new cache overwrite all the previos ones? But, you can still see the old cache of the google directory at the msn cache of the google directory page /resources_and_guides/ at http://cc.msnscache.com/cache.aspx?q...n-US&FORM=CVRE but not sure how much longer until this cache is updated as well. If the msn cache has changed, here a link to view a screenshot of the msn cache of this google directory page.

Every since pharmacysources.com has been indexed by google in 2001, the site has always had very high rankings (usually in the top 10) for 1000s of keywoards/phrases related to the site and several #1 rankings for competitive terms. We can not figure out why the site just suddenly vanished completely from google after being indexed for over 4 years. The site scructure and layout has basically been the same since the original design built in 2001. Only changes made over the years have been updating the content and adding of additional prescription medication info pages, for example pages like http://www.pharmacysources.com/codeine.asp . There have been no updates to the site in the past month, with the last update being around a month ago which was adding an additional medication info page,
http://www.pharmacysources.com/ritalin.asp.

We have worked very hard over the years to provide the best content available to our visitors and because of this hard work we have become one of the biggest and well known online pharmacy sites available, which in turn has resulted in several (I would guess easily over 50) sites copying our content but we have never copied content from other sites. I have noticed recently that many sites were copying our content along with our URL on their copied pages and then once they got pulled into google they would do a redirect to another site, there are probably at least 100 - 200 sites I have seen that have done this.

Could other sites that have been copying our content and redirecting to another site have something to do with pharmacysources.com being completely dropped from being indexed in google eventhough we have nothing to do with the duplication of our content/redirecting sites and as far as I know have no way to stop them from doing this?

Can anyone tell if the site pharmacysources.com has been banned from google for some reason and if it was banned any ideas what the reason my be? If it was banned what should we do, how long will the site stay banned before it will be pulled back into google?

Does any one have any suggestions or ideas as to what steps should be taken to try to correct the situation so that we can get the site back in google like it was?

Was our site banned or do you think it was some sort of glitch by google? Should we keep the site like it is and wait a while to see what happens or start moving the site to another URL and starting over?

Many people have worked very long hours over the years to try to make this site the most informative online pharmacy guide and we would hate for all the work to be wiped out of google instantly like this. We are looking for any suggestions, ideas, theories, etc because we just do not know what has happened. I sent google an email on sunday about this situation but have received no response yet, should I try to send them another emial asking about what may have happened or just wait a while and then send another email if no response after a few more days.

Thanks in advance to everyones for their help and time, it is greatly appreciated.

[cbp]

The site is currently down for me....

CBP

[cbp]

Its back up now..

Looks like you been hijacked by 2 sites:
http://www.clickxchange.com/fr.phtml?act=453972.265
http://www.the-affiliate-directory.com/cgi-bin/ tseek.cgi?id=370&ct=Health-Medicine&ln=

CBP

[cbp]

Out of curosity are you associated with a whole lot of other pharmacy and porn sites?

CBP

[rxsites]

No, we are not assocoiated with any porn sites but do have a few other pharmacy sites.

How can you tell that the site pharmacysources.com was hijacked by the 2 sites that you listed. I am not familiar with a site being hijacked. What exactly is this and how is it done? Is there a way for me to hijack my site back? How do you keep your site from being hijacked? Is there any way for me to fix this problem and get the site back into google? Do I need to contact google and let them know that the site has been hijacked by the sites below.

These 2 sites you have listed are sites that have signed up for our affiliate program, should I go ahead and disable their sites.

Thanks for the help as this is something completely new to me.

[cbp]

The hijack apparently is all to do with the way that Google handles 302 redirects --- I don't have a lot of experience with this, so someone with more may be able to help. But click on the links in my message and they redirect to your site. Google appears to have indexed them instead of you.

One thing I do when investigating dropped sites is to look for other sites that may be in a "scheme" or spammy network - the first thing I did was a search for your phone number (in inverted comma's) to see how many other sites have the same number --- I got lots of pharmacy sites and porn sites, so one immediately becomes suspicious as to what is going on.

CBP

[rxsites]

Ok, now I see why you are thinking those 2 sites have hijacked pharmacysources.com. When I went back and did the google search for pharmacysources.com it is now coming up with a link for "Find web pages from the site pharmacysources.com" and currently has about 15 of our affiliates listed there. When I was doing the google search for pharmacysources.com these results were not showing, it was only giving the option to "Find web pages that contain the term "pharmacysources.com". So it has just started returning the option to "Find web pages from the site pharmacysources.com" within the last hour, it has not been showing this option for the last 2 days, this is something new that just now started.

So since it is strating to bring up this information is this a good thing or a bad thing. Does it look like we may eventually get pulled back into google?

[rxsites]

The phone number is a 24 hour customer and billing support phone number for our billing company, netbilling.com. They do support for hundreds of websites including porn, pharmacy, as well as regular ecommerce sites.

[rxsites]

So does any one have any ideas or suggestions on what has happened to the site pharmacysources.com.

Late saturday night, march 26th, the site completely vanished from google as detailed earler. Then late tuesday night, march 29th, a google search for pharmacysources.com started coming back with a link to "Find web pages from the site pharmacysources.com" and when this link is clicked it brings back links from about 15 sites that are affiliates to pharmacysources.com.

One person has suggested that the site pharmacysources.com was hijacked by these affiliate sites. Does any one else know what has happened or seen anything like this before? Anyone have any suggestions as to what to do?

The site pharmacysources.com has over 500 affiliates, should we disable all the affiliates and ask them to remove their links to see if pharmacysources.com will get re-indexed by google or should we just wait a little longer to see what happens. We are open to all ideas, suggestions, and comments because know one can seem to figure out what has happened. Thanks in advance.

[incrediblehelp]

Here are some useful links:

http://www.threadwatch.org/node/1940

http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum30/28612.htm

http://clsc.net/research/google-302-page-hijack.htm

[DreamingEagle]

Originally Posted by rxsites

So does any one have any ideas or suggestions on what has happened to the site pharmacysources.com.

Late saturday night, march 26th, the site completely vanished from google as detailed earler. Then late tuesday night, march 29th, a google search for pharmacysources.com started coming back with a link to "Find web pages from the site pharmacysources.com" and when this link is clicked it brings back links from about 15 sites that are affiliates to pharmacysources.com.

One person has suggested that the site pharmacysources.com was hijacked by these affiliate sites. Does any one else know what has happened or seen anything like this before? Anyone have any suggestions as to what to do?

The site pharmacysources.com has over 500 affiliates, should we disable all the affiliates and ask them to remove their links to see if pharmacysources.com will get re-indexed by google or should we just wait a little longer to see what happens. We are open to all ideas, suggestions, and comments because know one can seem to figure out what has happened. Thanks in advance.

Is that ALT text on the Buy Now images new?

[rxsites]

Originally Posted by DreamingEagle

Is that ALT text on the Buy Now images new?

No, the Alt text on the Buy Now images has been there for about 3 years. The site has basically been the same since it was built 4 years ago except for a few minor updates to the content with the last update being about 1 - 1.5 months ago.

[incrediblehelp]

The website didnt change, Google did.

[DrTandem1]

A 302 redirest from another site to yours should have no effect on your site, just the site using the 302 redirect.

Now, I think the interesting thing that was discovered is that you use an 800 service that also answers for a multitude of other sites. I suspect that this is the clue that explains what may have happened.

Other on-line pharmacies, and there are a gazillion, may share this phone number and probably your other content. I get dozens of requests from pharmacy sites for a link exchange with my clients (which I rarely will do), and many look just like yours. Because they are all so similar, I won't accept a link exchange with them. So, duplicate content may be a culprit.

The reason I think that the phone number is an important factor is that phone numbers are usually unique identifiers. Having ten digits in the pattern of xxx-xxx-xxxx makes it a likely candidate to be part of an algo. Indeed, you can enter a phone number using dashes or spaces with that pattern and Google will find a match.

Here's a solution to fixing that problem. Get a unique phone number that is easy to remember, another toll-free number would be ideal (they're cheap), and forward it to the 800 service you are now using. Change the phone number on your site to this unique number. You will then have a unique presence on the internet that will probably not be copied.

Also, one poster noticed that your site was down. Since this should be a rare event, I think it is more common than you know. It may have been down when Google made a visit. You may want to engage a monitoring service just to alert you when your site is down. If it's a problem, change hosts immediately.

[rxsites]

DrTandem1,

Thanks for the reply and info. I am beginning to think that the site was dropped due to duplicate content, the contatnt we have on our site is 100% original written by us 4 years ago. The problem we have been running into is that large numbers of sites copy our content, many times word for word and some of the even more lazy webmasters will even leave links and images linked to our server. We have been having this problem with sites duplicating our content for over 3 years and it is hard to keep track of all the copiers. Our lawyers send out letters to the offenders as well as contact their webhosts and this works simetimes, other times the requests just go ignored and there is not really much that can be done about it. If you happen to know of anything that can be done to stop the thieves I would really like to hear about it, because it is a growing problem.

I have also noticed the same problem that has happen to our site being dropped from google, losing the pr and backlinks, has also happened to quite a few other sites. For exanple, a site called http://www.templatemonster.com, which is a popular site that sells web templates had the exact same thing happen to them by google and they also have very many affiliates. They have taken the action of sending emails to affiliates telling them to disable links pointing to their site. Do you think that this is something that I should do as well?

We run the site on one of the best dedicated servers that Interland has to offer and we have 24/7 monitoring of the server and it did not have any down time during the period. I was just looking over the log files and noticed that the googlebot is visiting our server about 3 times a day now, before we were dropped it was hitting the site about 14 times a day.

Thanks for the tip about the phone number, I will look into getting my own and having it forwarded to the customer support department, I think that is a great idea. Because yes, there are quite a few sites that also use that number as their support number, netbilling.com is one of the largest online payment processors with customer support, they are similiar to ibill.com, verotel.com, ccbill.com, etc.

Do you know of any steps I should take to try to get this situation straightened out or should I just wait it out and see if it corrects on its own? Sould I try to contact google again about this matter, if so what should I tell them? Do you know of anyone that is familiar working with fixing these types of problems and if they are looking for any work? We are willing to pay someone to get this mess straightened out.

[DrTandem1]

Unfortunately, the only ones that really know what happened to your site is Google. All of our ideas are nothing more than educated guesses. So, yes, you could try contacting them on the matter, but I wouldn't expect much of a reply.

As far as people linking to your images, you could stop that by having them generated via a PHP script. Now, they could still copy the images and use them, but at least it would save your bandwidth.

You could also do the same thing with your content, but I'm not a big fan of using dynamic web pages, especially with the content. Google doesn't seem to put a lot of energy into indexing dynamic content.

Defending copyrighted work on the internet is a losing battle. It's difficult to prove, it is even more difficult to collect damages. Many of these pirates are out of the country and therefore out of reach. even if you were successful, another would likely pop-up tomorrow.

I wouldn't do anything drastic. Just work on what you can control and make your site the best it can be for the visitor and back it up with excellent customer service.

[cspelts]

Originally Posted by DrTandem1

Google doesn't seem to put a lot of energy into indexing dynamic content.

Not true! If you read the other thread on this subject, you'll find that Google *limits* the number of pages it indexes on dynamically generated sites, because their "web crawler can easily overwhelm and crash sites serving dynamic content", but in my experience Google will still index hundreds of pages.

I have one site with 4800 records in the database, (so 4800 dynamically generated pages) and every page has been indexed. I have another site with 1800 records, and only 500 pages have been indexed, but the site is only a few months old.

[DrTandem1]

Originally Posted by cspelts

Not true! If you read the other thread on this subject, you'll find that Google *limits* the number of pages it indexes on dynamically generated sites, because their "web crawler can easily overwhelm and crash sites serving dynamic content", but in my experience Google will still index hundreds of pages.

I have one site with 4800 records in the database, (so 4800 dynamically generated pages) and every page has been indexed. I have another site with 1800 records, and only 500 pages have been indexed, but the site is only a few months old.

Weren't you the one telling me on another thread that you dynamically created your title tags and other information in the head section of the page?

[cspelts]

Yes.

[DrTandem1]

And the point of doing so is what?