How is my competition causing bad crawl errors and links on my site
-
We have a compeditor who we are in a legal dispute at the moment, and they are using under hand tactics to cause us to have bad links and crawl errors and i do not know how they are doing it or how to stop it.
The crawl errors we are getting is the site having two urls together, for example www.testsite.com/www.testsite.com and other errors are pages that we do not even have or pages that are spelt wrong or have a dot after the page name.
We have been told off a number of people in our field that this has also happened to them and i would like to know how they are doing it so we can have this stopped
Since they have been doing this our traffic has gone down by half
-
Hi no there is only me who deals with the site. I have put copyright notice on the site but i will read about authorship accorss the site.
-
Hi Diane,
I like the way Ryan thinks!
...but I am hoping we won't have to go to the length of having to resort to a content bomb.
The lesson in a situation like this is to realize that being a good white hat SEO unfortunately means needing an understanding of some of the tactics used by black hats
or maybe just a little help from some friends
Since there is obviously an issue with your content being copied, the first thing I would do is to implement Authorship markup across your entire site. By doing this you ensure that any content that is "borrowed" is immediately "outed" to the search engines because it doesn't have an external link from your Google profile page, which acts as verification that you are in fact the author of the content. Matt Cutts and Othar Hansson have given a really easy rundown on implementation in this Google Webmaster Help video
For the moment though, it would be better if you can avoid making any changes to the site until we can identify all of the issues in play.
BTW ... I think I have an inkling of what might be going on here ... is there a programmer or designer who is or has been involved in the development of the site besides yourself?
In the meantime, I'm continuing with a diagnostic based on the information we have and will let you know as soon as I have confirmed my suspicions or otherwise.
Hang in there,
Sha
-
May I suggest planting a "bomb" in your content?
Most thieves are lazy. Rather then create content themselves they steal from others. Their laziness is dependable.
Take a look at their copies and determine what content is and is not being stolen. If they are copying everything including the HTML code and meta tags, you can add canonical tags to your site and other helpful code.
If they are not copying the meta tags, you can add fake content and use the noindex, nofollow tag to protect your site, but provide content which otherwise would cause a site to be removed from Google's index. When they steal the content, it wont have the noindex tag and the site would get nailed.
There are many other possibilities but I am confident you can outsmart them if you try. In addition, be sure to report the site(s) to Google: http://www.google.com/support/bin/static.py?page=ts.cs&ts=1114905
Another idea is to copyright your work, thereby protecting it and giving you legal proof the content is yours.
-
thanks for this, will send private message. we have had to redo the site so many times with new content because the content keeps on being stolen by a franchise group who then pass it on to their franchisees.
-
Hi Diane,
Ryan's response is spot on and his suggestions are excellent.
If you can provide the URL(s), then we can take a look and see exactly what is going on with the referring page(s).
If you don't want to share the information publicly in the Q&A, you can private message each of us through your SEOmoz profile page.
If you ever think that someone has access to edit pages on your site without your permission, the first thing to do is to check with your service provider whether there are any active ftp accounts that you are unaware of. I have seen situations before where people have managed to get a "back door" set up and then it is as simple as logging in and changing pages without your knowledge.
Given that this involves a legal dispute, if we can do a proper diagnosis and trace the source of the errors (or if there happens to be a back door in place), then you would be able to:
- issue a cease and desist
- better secure the server against unauthorized access
- Ban any ip addresses identified as malicious
Hope that helps,
Sha
-
You mentioned these are crawl errors. Are you using the SEOmoz crawl report? If so, please look at the "referrer" field. It will offer the page on your site which is providing the bad URL.
If you are willing to share the referring page, we can take a look and possibly provide more detail.
Anyone can create bad links to your site which can appear in Google or Bing WMT. Only someone with the ability to add content on your site can create crawl errors. Either your site is open to user generated content and someone created a bad link, or someone with access to your web server created the content.
-
will do thanks
-
If iit is happniong to many, then maybe its a reason not to suspect them, but like i say go to Bing WMT and have a look at where the links ae comming from.
-
the reason why i know they are behind it, is because other companies in the field of the website have had the same problems and after doing research for our legal team over this matter, we spent time speaking to over 40 people in the field of the website and found it happened to them aswell.
These people are cowboys but hopefully it will all be sorted out soon.
-
I would look in Bing WMT to see where the links are comming from for a start.
i must say also, If you dont know how they are doing it, then maybe you dont know if they are doing it., it may be somthing quite inocent.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Broken canonical link errors
Hello, Several tools I'm using are returning errors due to "broken canonical links". However, I'm not too sure why is that. Eg.
Technical SEO | | GhillC
Page URL: domain.com/page.html?xxxx
Canonical link URL: domain.com/page.html
Returns an error. Any idea why? Am I doing it wrong? Thanks,
G1 -
Why is Google Webmaster Tools showing 404 Page Not Found Errors for web pages that don't have anything to do with my site?
I am currently working on a small site with approx 50 web pages. In the crawl error section in WMT Google has highlighted over 10,000 page not found errors for pages that have nothing to do with my site. Anyone come across this before?
Technical SEO | | Pete40 -
Is it possible to export Inbound Links in a CSV file categorized by Linking Root Domains ?
Hi, I am performing an analysis of the total inbound links to my homepage and I would like to have the total amount of inbound links categorized by the Linking root domains. For example, the Open Site explorer does offer the feature to show you the Linking Root Domains to your page. Then when you click on the first Linking Root Domain, it also shows you the Top Linking Pages ( Which means all the pages that link to your page from this particular top level domain) Now I would like to export this data to a CSV file, but open site explorer only exports the total amount of top level linking domains. Does anyone has a solution to this problem ? Thank you very much for the help in advance!
Technical SEO | | Feweb0 -
Why is my site going from bad to worse in the SERPS?
I've been having issues ranking for the key word kayak fishing. At one point a few months ago I managed to get my site www.yakangler.com to page 2 but have since fallen back to page 20+. I thought it was because of keyword stuffing or over optimization so I made some tweaks to my home page and started to see a small daily rise but stopped at page 19. I have since slipped back to the top of page 24... What am I doing wrong? I don't employ any blackhat linking, I know I have some W3C validation errors on my home page "many caused by the facebook like button". Any ideas on how to improve my SERPS would be greatly appreciated. The most frustrating thing is comparing my site to the top Google searches for that key word... I should be doing fine definitely not page 24! Much gratitude in advance for any help you can offer!
Technical SEO | | mr_w0 -
Too Many On Page Links Error On Wordpress Blog
I have a wordpress blog. I am getting an error message from SEOmoz "too many on page links" However SEOmoz is counting a full month of blogs as one page. For example-3 onpage internal links in each blog times 30 different blog article in a month is recorded as 90 on page links. Is there any mechanism to fix this on wordpress
Technical SEO | | wianno1680 -
Increase in authorization permission errors error after site switch
We launched our new site 2 days ago , since site was down for 12 hours for maintenance, we saw google webmaster tool shows this error . Since then google hasnt crawled, its been 36 hours. Do we need to do anyting? We have close to a million page google crawled before and I am wondering if this will effect anything.
Technical SEO | | tpt.com0 -
How can you get the right site links for your site?
Hello all, I have been trying to get Google to list relevant site links for my site when you type in our brand name, Loco2 or for when Loco2 comes up in a search result. Different things come up when you search Loco2 and Loco 2. We would like site links to look like how they do when you search Loco 2. However Loco2 is our brand name, NOT Loco 2. Does anyone know why Google is doing this and whether we can influence results? We have done as much as possible via Google webmaster, in terms of specifying the links we DO NOT want Google to list for Loco2. However, when you search "Loco2", results only show simple site links. Ideally what we want is: Loco2 to be recognised as the brand NOT Loco 2 The same results (substantial, identical) for Loco2 as for Loco 2 (think o2 and o 2) For the site links to reflect the main pages of our site (Times & Tickets, Engine Room forum etc.) Many thanks in advance! Anila
Technical SEO | | anilababla0 -
Partial Site Move -- Tell Google Entire Site Moved?
OK this one's a little confusing, please try to follow along. We recently went through a rebranding where we brought a new domain online for one of our brands (we'll call this domain 'B' -- it's also not the site linked to in my profile, not to confuse things). This brand accounted for 90% of the pages and 90% of the e-comm on the existing domain (we'll call the existing domain 'A') . 'A' was also redesigned and it's URL structure has changed. We have 301s in place on A that redirect to B for those 90% of pages and we also have internal 301s on A for the remaining 10% of pages whose URL has changed as a result of the A redesign What I'm wondering is if I should tell Google through webmaster tools that 'A' is now 'B' through the 'Change of Address' form. If I do this, will the existing products that remain on A suffer? I suppose I could just 301 the 10% of URLs on B back to A but I'm wondering if Google would see that as a loop since I just got done telling it that A is now B. I realize there probably isn't a perfect answer here but I'm looking for the "least worst" solution. I also realize that it's not optimal that we moved 90% of the pages from A to B, but it's the situation we're in.
Technical SEO | | badgerdigital0