google exclusion question

[Kinembe]

a site of mine has been excluded from googles index after several years with #1 rankings. i have no idea why it was excluded, i am not a webmaster, but the site doesn't totaly suck and i really don't know why it's been banned.

anyway, my question is if anybody has any advice about the reinclusion request process? i don't know what i need to change before requesting reinclusion, but i changed a couple page titles as a couple were repeated, but i don't see any problems in the site.

All-Game Taxidermy New Jersey's Premier Taxidermist Studio For Over 20 Years.

[mktgbill]

Which expressions were you previously ranking for?

Are you currently using Google's Webmaster Tools to see when you were last spidered and if there are errors or problems spidering your pages? The webmaster tools also allow you to submit for re-inclusion.

I'm also not sure how the spiders will read the first line of your robots.txt file. Comments generally follow at the end of directive lines.

Send me a PM if you need some help.

[mktgbill]

after checking about the leading comment in the robots.txt file it appears that this is acceptable......

[wige]

I would get rid of line 1 and line 3 from your robots.txt file. Although they are acceptable, spiders may not parse these lines correctly. Especially the empy Disallow, followed by an explicit disallow.

[mrjeff]

I think it's because of the thousands of pages and hundreds of subdomains that look like they where created with a page generator:
https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.co...etaxidermy.com

I would clean those up first and then submit a request for reinclusion:
How do I request reconsideration of my site?

[Kinembe]

well that site explorer link shows a bunch of stuff that i can't explain. any idea what is all that stuff or where it came from? or what to do about it?

[ron angel]

Originally Posted by Kinembe

a site of mine has been excluded from googles index after several years with #1 rankings. i have no idea why it was excluded, i am not a webmaster, but the site doesn't totaly suck and i really don't know why it's been banned.

anyway, my question is if anybody has any advice about the reinclusion request process? i don't know what i need to change before requesting reinclusion, but i changed a couple page titles as a couple were repeated, but i don't see any problems in the site.

All-Game Taxidermy New Jersey's Premier Taxidermist Studio For Over 20 Years.

I would suggest an empty robots.txt file although your one looks perfectly correct I have always thought it better to not exclude anything when it comes to getting site indexed better to have all of it than miss out the part you wanted included.

[Serious]

This is perfectly normal. Spammy websites are blacklisted as soon as they are found so is yours. Clean it first and ask to be included again.

[crankydave]

Why do you have a class labeled as "hide"?

Dave

[craigmn3]

Running it through a few SEO tools the following results are interesting. (nod to Webnauts)

-----------------------------------
Title:

Warning: The Title relevancy to page content is 73% which is poor.

Description:

Error: This tag contains too many characters. This tag contains 209 characters. This is too many for what we would consider a 'robot friendly' web page. The maximum number of characters we recommend for this tag is 200. Please keep in mind that most search engines will display no more than the first 160 characters (including spaces) of this tag.

The Description relevancy to page content is 90%, which is very good.

Keywords:

Warning: This tag contains too many keywords. This tag contains 13 keywords. This is too many for what we would consider a 'robot friendly' web page. The maximum number of keywords we recommend for this tag is 8.

Warning: The keywords tag contain stop words. The keyword(s) 'in' are stop words and ignored by the most search engines.

Warning: The keywords relevancy to page content is 62%, which is very poor.

--------------------------------------------

All the above may not be an issue, especially the keywords but I would tighten up the Decription and Title

I am also wondering if your use of white text over a black background over a white background and black text over a white background over a black background might be tripping a "hidden" text flag

Also your anchor tags and alt image tags are a mess.....you number 1 achor tag is "contact"

The site needs a good SEO scrubbing to focus one what your trying to sell and what people are searching

[spiderbait]

I'm interested in learning the source of all those spammy URLs reported in Yahoo! Site Explorer. If the site owner honestly doesn't know how they got there, I'm curious to learn about their origin.

They appear to all be WordPress posts/comments, largely in French and they exist on multiple 3-character subdomains, such as (edit URL CD)

Is this some form of hijacking?

I notice that the "links" column on the right of each page contains links to multiple external domains including a lot of porn sites.

I recently had a client's blog hacked to insert a script that used user-agent detection to serve spammy content to Google and error pages to real browsers. So, I'm curious to stay on top of these things and find ways to detect and prevent them in the future.

[crankydave]

Originally Posted by craigmn3

-----------------------------------
Title:

Warning: The Title relevancy to page content is 73% which is poor.

I question this. The title is very relevant.

Dave

[youds]

[Invalid] Markup Validation of http://www.allgametaxidermy.com/ - W3C Markup Validator

Cynthia Says Report

You'll have a better argument to take to Google once you sort those things out.

The recent way in which Google handles sub-domains (it now sees them as folders) would probably explain the change in your sites rankings. As you have been told, your site has a lot of spammy sub domains.

[crankydave]

Spiderbait...

The URL you posted has "issues". All sorts of bells and whistles popped up when I clicked it so I edited it out.

Dave

[spiderbait]

Originally Posted by crankydave

Spiderbait...

The URL you posted has "issues". All sorts of bells and whistles popped up when I clicked it so I edited it out.

Dave

Hi Dave,

We must have edited it about the same time, because I edited to leave it as plain text without the URL tag, but your edit to remove it completely must have come just after mine.

I thought it was useful to give a sample of the spammy subdomains, so here it is again, without hyperlinking.

spa.allgametaxidermy.com

[Kinembe]

Originally Posted by spiderbait

I'm interested in learning the source of all those spammy URLs reported in Yahoo! Site Explorer. If the site owner honestly doesn't know how they got there, I'm curious to learn about their origin.

They appear to all be WordPress posts/comments, largely in French and they exist on multiple 3-character subdomains, such as (edit URL CD)

Is this some form of hijacking?

I notice that the "links" column on the right of each page contains links to multiple external domains including a lot of porn sites.

I recently had a client's blog hacked to insert a script that used user-agent detection to serve spammy content to Google and error pages to real browsers. So, I'm curious to stay on top of these things and find ways to detect and prevent them in the future.

i am interested in learning the source too. these subdomains are not mine, i have not made them and i can't find them in my control panel or with my ftp software.

as i said, the site is not perfect, but does not deserve exclusion either for a few errors...doesn't it seem more likely that it is due to these subdomains?

[spiderbait]

Originally Posted by Kinembe

i am interested in learning the source too. these subdomains are not mine, i have not made them and i can't find them in my control panel or with my ftp software.

as i said, the site is not perfect, but does not deserve exclusion either for a few errors...doesn't it seem more likely that it is due to these subdomains?

Kinembe,

I'm sure that it's because of those subdomains. As I mentioned in my PM to you, I think your site has been hacked. Probably not by a person, but by a robot that has found a security hole and was able to write files to your server, including writing to your .htaccess file, which is probably how it's creating the "illusion" of all those subdomains.

Without accessing your server that's just a guess, but probably right on the money.

[crankydave]

Originally Posted by spiderbait

Hi Dave,

We must have edited it about the same time, because I edited to leave it as plain text without the URL tag, but your edit to remove it completely must have come just after mine.

I thought it was useful to give a sample of the spammy subdomains, so here it is again, without hyperlinking.

spa.allgametaxidermy.com

No problem. And yes, a URL could be helpful.

Interestingly, I just got served another totally different page by the URL. Hosting issue?

Dave

[wige]

It is quite likely, although other factors may have had an effect on the decision.

Is your site on a shared host, or a dedicated server? Also, is it hosted by your SEO/developer or an independent company, or do you host it yourself?

Also, do you want me to do a quick check for possible vulnerabilities on the server?

[crankydave]

wow...

The list of subdomains that I found on the the url that spiderbait provided is staggering. There's over 150 of them.

Dave

[Serious]

Questions:
1) do you manage your DNS records? if not, who does it for you? (you have an * on it)
2) you probably use a colo, who manages it? Looks like a bad configuration too.

Add a .htaccess to redirect everything not on All-Game Taxidermy New Jersey's Premier Taxidermist Studio For Over 20 Years. to that domain.
Take control of your domain if you don't have it
Change your hosting

[Kinembe]

i manage everything, but like i said, i am a fisherman, not a web designer. my knowlege is basic and though i understand most of what has been posted, the comment on .htaccess and use of a 'colo' are beyond my knowledge.

i have a primary account with lunarpages and i have 9 more domains under that primary account, allgametaxidermy.com being one of them. i checked a few of the others and as far as i can tell, they do not have the same problem. and wige, you can feel free to check for whatever vunerabilities you'd like. i also dropped an email to support at my hosting company.

thanks for the help so far everybody.

[Kinembe]

well here is the message i recieved from google...

Dear site owner or webmaster of allgametaxidermy.com,

While we were indexing your webpages, we detected that some of your pages were using techniques that were outside our quality guidelines, which can be found here: Webmaster Guidelines

In order to preserve the quality of our search engine, we have temporarily removed some webpages from our search results. Currently pages from allgametaxidermy.com are scheduled to be removed for at least 30 days.

Specifically, we detected the following practices on your webpages:

* Doorway pages such as:

wreath.allgametaxidermy.com/

logitec.allgametaxidermy.com/

son.allgametaxidermy.com/

[...]

We would prefer to have your pages in Google's index. If you wish to be reincluded, please correct or remove all pages that are outside our quality guidelines. When you are ready, please submit a reinclusion request at https://www.google.com/webmasters/to...nclusion?hl=en

Sincerely,

Google Search Quality Team


...now i guess i gotta figure out how to get rid of these domains

[Toni Anicic]

You are the owner of the domain, there should be no problem in removing thees subdomains. If you are not able tu do it yourself, contact your web host. If they don't do it, it is time to change your web host.

[Feydakin]

Give the support guys at LunarPages a shout and show them what is going on.. They are real good guys and can tell you what is going on and probably help you clean it up quickly..

Then hit the Google reinclusion request and explain the hack that happened..

[eastbiz]

Same thing happened to me on December 12. Two of my sites Nevada Corporation - $283 Full service with Registered Agent and Beach Cruisers - great style cruiser bikes for women and men dropped completely from index. Both had top rankings.

I couldn't find them even when searching for domain name on Google. I searched xyzbikes.com and it didn't find my site.

I checked webmaster console and it said that both sites are not included in the index.

Google console didn't have any message why it happened. It didn't have any mentioning about spamming or other issues with my site.

I submit reinclusion request, but still waiting for response. Didn't get anything till today, which is kind of frustrating.

I tried to submit sitemap through Webmaster Tools console and suddenly the sites got back to index. Approx. December 15.

But I still cannot find them at the top. Even when searching for very unique word INCPARADISE, we do not rank high. This is our registered trademark and unique word, but we are on 50 something place in search results. What can I do? Is there any way to get answer from Google?

[Serious]

Originally Posted by Feydakin

Give the support guys at LunarPages a shout

A shoot instead. From what we can see, the server is badly configured. And the domain too.

[crankydave]

Originally Posted by Serious

A shoot instead. From what we can see, the server is badly configured. And the domain too.

I wouldn't be too quick. Could be a dedicated server for which the user has complete control. In which case contacting the host for assistance would be a good idea.

Dave

[ulrich]

Check webmastertools on Google Link schemes

Good luck

[wige]

Scanning the server now. There was an "SEO technique" that came to light about a year ago, where programmers would use a wildcard DNS entry (*.yourdomain.com) in combination with Apache virtual hosting and a very simple PHP script to generate a literally infinite assortment of keyword rich subdomains that all pointed to one another, and each page contained a single link back to the main domain. Because in many cases Google considers a subdomain to be more like an outside site than a folder, these links would be given more weight than randomly generated pages within your main subdomain. Additionally, since these dynamically generated subdomains randomized the text served to the bots, duplicate content issues could be avoided. And, because of the way Google handled subdomains, there was a chance the site could avoid penalties, with only the subdomains being deindexed.

As Google is now aware of this technique, it is much less effective. Google has gotten pretty good at spotting these domains. Did you hire any outside contractors to perform SEO on your site, or to develop the site itself?

I finished the scan, and sent you some results in PM. I didn't see anything major, or anything you would be able to fix on your end. I have a feeling that this was most likely done by an SEO or developer. We had a former developer (who built our company web site about 10 years ago) do us a similar "favor" creating landing pages pointing to us on other sites he developed. Now, there is no way to get rid of those landing pages, and Google has them all indexed. Fortunately, the worst that should happen is the landing pages themselves would be deindexed.

[crankydave]

Whoever it is has been busy.

I found several other sites that have the same problem.

There was more than 1200 subdomains I found that resolve to the same IP as 2 of the subdomains on your site.

As wige said, scripted pages. Another one is downtowngainesville.com On a different server altogether and it is a mess. There are lots more.

Dave

[mktgbill]

[QUOTE=mrjeff;354780]I think it's because of the thousands of pages and hundreds of subdomains that look like they where created with a page generator:
https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.co...etaxidermy.com

Good catch mrjeff. I once saw a competitor's site hacked in a similar manner. Knembe, I'd check to see if the CMS you're using (assuming it's a CMS) is up to date or if there's something else installed that's causing this. First thing I'd do is a backup of databases and files.

[spiderbait]

Hi Kinembe,

I've just done some more digging based on the lunarpages info you sent me via PM.

I think this is definitely being perpetrated through your DNS settings. I've no idea how this would be done, but the fact that you've got additional nameservers pointing to jhb3ebj.info is clearly the problem. Looking up jhb3ebj.info reveals everything you need to know for confirming this is the source of the problem.

Fix your DNS and you'll fix this problem.

From a crusading white knight perspective, this hijacking is not unique to you (as Dave mentioned above) so it might be nice to put a little effort into shutting this spam-scam down. There are many other victims experiencing the same problem as you right now from the same server. Most probably have no idea.

If you search for other sites on the same server as jhb3ebj.info (I used myipneighbors.com ) you'll see many other sites with similarly spammy subdomains alongside yours. The list stops at 1000, but I'm sure there are thousands more.

So, in addition to fixing your DNS, I think you should contact the host. They seem reputable and probably don't realize how their server is being misused.

jhb3ebj.info is hosted by HopOne Internet (in WA, US) with the following contact info:

OrgAbuseName: Abuse Department
OrgAbusePhone: 206-438-5909
OrgAbuseEmail: abuse@hopone.net

OrgTechHandle: HJ48-ARIN
OrgTechName: Jass, Haralds
OrgTechPhone: +1-206-438-5909
OrgTechEmail: hjass@hopone.net

I hope this all helps,
Jade

[wige]

Its actually really really easy. Most DNS servers have a wildcard operator that catches all subdomains you haven't specifically created, and routes them to your A record (the IP that is set for your domain name, without a specified subdomain). In the server configuration, after all of the virtual hosts are specified, you add a new entry with the following directive:

ServerAlias *.hackeddomain.com
DocumentRoot /hackedfolder/

In the Document root, you place a php script called index.php that dynamically creates pages filled with randomized but keyword rich text, as well as hundreds of links to other randomized subdomains. By editing one file and creating another, you create millions of subdomains linking back to the original domain.

However, this is not the case in your situation it seems. Your site is hosted at 209.200.253.150. Your registrar (Tucows, with iPowerWeb as the reseller) lists your Nameservers as n1.allgametaxidermy.com and n2.allgametaxidermy.com, both of which show an IP address of 209.160.32.195. This is the IP address that ALL of the fraudulent subdomains resolve to. Either someone has compromised your nameserver, or someone has altered your DNS records.

At least that is my understanding of the issue. I would check with your hosting company, and with your registrar to get the authoritative nameserver changed. This report may give you some more useful information.

[crankydave]

Originally Posted by wige

(Tucows, with iPowerWeb as the reseller)

Interesting wige.

A little birdie told me that someone spent the most of a day contacting many of the affected sites letting them know of the problem. Two of them, as the little birdie explained, said their host was iPowerWeb.

Dave

[Kinembe]

well i straightened out the dns info and requested reinclusion and have returned to the top of the listings under searches like 'taxidermy in new jersey'

thanks for all the help, especially mrjeff with that 'site explorer' as i never would have found all of those subdomains and would not have figured this out alone.