Google Cached Page Weirdness

[biggerfish]

Last week I saw my page rank drop like a stone from a 5 to a 3. Viewing my cached page by entering cache:www.bigpromotions.net into Google shows that Google has visited my site recently, and all is well. The only potentially weird thing is that the Google domain has been replaced with an IP number 64.233.161.104, making the resulting URL be:

http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache...s&ct=clnk&cd=1

OK cool. So Google knows about me. They've been by recently. Good.

But when on the Sitemaps pages, I click on the Statistics tab, and then on the Index stats sub-tab. One of the links is to view my cached page. So I click that link - again, it's displayed as cache:www.bigpromotions.net - the resulting Google domain is again replaced with an IP number, but a different one: 72.14.209.104. So the resulting URL is:

http://72.14.209.104/search?q=cache:...en&lr=&strip=0

This url shows my COMPETITOR'S site as the cached version of MINE. Kind of. The copy at the top references his domain, but references mine in the bookmark line:

This is G o o g l e's cache of http://www.example.com/ as retrieved on 2 Jul 2006 19:45:31 GMT. G o o g l e's cache is the snapshot that we took of the page as we crawled the web. The page may have changed since that time. Click here for the current page without highlighting. This cached page may reference images which are no longer available. Click here for the cached text only. To link to or bookmark this page, use the following url: http://www.google.com/search?q=cache...en&lr=&strip=0

NOTE: This is NOT the competitors main site, but one that he's developing. The site that actually competes with mine is totally different.

What gives? How did he do that? and Why would he do that? what is there to gain? And what's with the IP number replacement thing? Why is that there, and why is it different depending on what page it comes from?

Thanks in advance for any assistance.

[Webnauts]

Report that to google" He is hijacking your PR (Page Ranking).

I catched someone else some days ago, and when I mailed him he quit it. :)

Some tips: http://www.loriswebs.com/hijacking_web_pages.html

[google junky]

Webnauts: That was a great page to read

[Webnauts]

Originally Posted by google junky

Webnauts: That was a great page to read

I am glad that you liked it. It is really useful. :)

[biggerfish]

Webnauts, I've read and re-read the page you provided, and still can't figure out how to fix this problem, nor how it even can occur.

You tell me to "report it to google" - but to who/whom?

This is very frustrating to say the least.

[Webnauts]

Originally Posted by biggerfish

Webnauts, I've read and re-read the page you provided, and still can't figure out how to fix this problem, nor how it even can occur.

You tell me to "report it to google" - but to who/whom?

This is very frustrating to say the least.

I would suggest to report the problem to Google here: http://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html and besides contact the site owner per mail, asking him gently to quit playing around hijacking your PR, explaining that you already have reported that to google.

The next thing you should do, is to add in the headers of your document, a tag with the absolute URL of each page.

For example like: <base href="http://www.yoursite.com">, etc.

If you still don't get the message you will need professional help.

[Webnauts]

And by the way I am located in Bielefeld, Nordrhein-Westfalen. :)