Chinese Site Ranking for our brand name - possible hack?
-
Hello,
We have been notified in the weekly MOZ rankings that we no longer rank for our brand name, which is almost unthinkable as nobody would target it. When I googled it, there is a Chinese site ranking at number one and using our brand name and meta data.
What is very strange is that although our internal pages rank in the secondary positions, our homepage does not appear at all for the brand name. Therefore, I am wondering if somehow we have had some sort of hack and they are somehow redirecting to their own site?
The brand name is "uksoccershop". Has anyone ever encountered anything like this before or have any idea on what we should do?
Thanks for your help.
-
They send tons of links from other domains that have been hacked to the waldorf domain. If you check open site explorer you see that there are 100nds of links to a page type /style.asp - all with anchor text replica watches, probably the previous target. I guess they did the same thing for the soccer site - but that these links do not yet show up in open site explorer. Seem to be the only plausible explanation why this site would rank for another sites brandname.
Apparently Google' algorithm is unable to catch these quite obvious tricks (cloaking, spammy links, duplicate content,...).
rgds,
Dirk
-
I think you're probably right that the site has been hacked, but I'm not seeing where. It's clear that the ranking site, waldorf.org, has a redirect pointing to http://www.cheapsoccerjerseyhd.com/
Were you able to find anything about WHY the home page http://www.uksoccershop.com/ wasn't ranking, though? I don't see any redirects, links, noindex, or canonical tags on that page. It's live, so I can't figure out why it won't show in Google. Ran header checks looking for x-robots or something, still can't see problems.
Do you see anything in Webmaster tools? Warnings, pages that have been removed, change of address filings, or that someone's checked the option not to index the site?
Edit: Looks to me like you're just being outranked by a hacked site. I'd expect you'd still show up for your domain, but I guess not. Still Check WMT.
-
Hi,
Don't know exactly the technique they use - but they hacked the site - presented the content of your site to Google as you can see here: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:zFtvwoO5EhoJ:www.waldorf.org.za/foot.asp+&cd=1&hl=nl&ct=clnk&gl=uk - it's an exact copy of your site - so they present your site to Googlebot. It's not only the homepage - other pages are indexed as well: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:jC3Etl7Fd2EJ:http://www.waldorf.org.za/foot.asp?products/28122.html%2Bhttp://www.waldorf.org.za/foot.asp&hl=nl-GB&gbv=2&&ct=clnk
They implemented a 302 on the page (I guess based on referrer that redirects you to the cheap soccer site) - if you visit the url directly you just get an innocent linux install page.
File a complaint @Google & warn the owner of the domain that the site is hacked (the hackers also inserted spammy links on the normal version of the site) - would start with Google so you have proof about what's happening.
rgds,
Dirk
-
I'm not sure we have been scraped as such though, because the site in question has different content.
It looks as though the offending site has hacked another site (which redirects to the offending site) but the hacked site is ranking for our brand name. Our homepage has lost all rankings it had (our category and product pages seem fine) and has essentially disappeared.
Can anyone else shed any light?
-
I don't know anything about hacks, so I can't address that question.
The site appears to be South African. I would get in touch with them and tell them to take the content down. If that does not work immediately I would file DMCA with google to remove them from the Google SERPs if that is your branded content on their website, or your authorship or your images.
If only one site is doing this then you might be able to solve it easily. If it spread to multiple sites then you could be in for a problem.
-
Thanks for the reply, although that is a very scary answer!
Looking at our situation, do you think that is what has happened?
If so, what steps should we take to stop the problem getting any worse as a first step?
Regards,
Simon
-
Just a story...
I had a retail website and we started selling a number of outdoor products were manufactured in China. We spent a lot of time taking great photos to show the features of the products and writing our best content to describe and sell the product. Things were going great. We were ranking for generic product names (like "winter sleeping bag"), pulling in some traffic and making some sales.
Traffic into these pages started to slow, sales started to drop, and we wonder what is wrong. We go out into the SERPs and discover lots of Chinese websites (with English language content) had grabbed our content, our images and were now selling same merchandise or were simply displaying the merchandise with ads. These websites were all hosted in Asia. My website was being filtered from the Gooogle SERPs. There were not five or ten of these websites. Our content was on several hundred of other websites - all hosted in Asia. If you emailed them about content theft they would not respond.
My sales dropped to a really low level. The only people buying these products were entering my site for other keywords. These pages were getting almost no traffic from search. I stopped restocking this merchandise and eventually donated thousands of dollars worth of gear to my local Goodwill Industries. I did that because the amount of work to DMCA all of these sites was very high and that work might not result in getting them taken down and my site restored to a strong selling position.
Good luck. This is not an easy problem to solve.
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
-
Strong Site, Pages, Ranking Low
Hey Mozers This is a question which has been bugging me for a while now I have an authority site in my niche which has a stronger DA than pretty well every competitor, but certain sections of the site underperform. For instance, when you search for 'Jerusalem Dead Sea tour', my item, http://www.touristisrael.com/tours/jerusalem-dead-sea-day-tour/ does not appear in the first few pages. I have a page that appears on the first page, but it is less relevant than this product page. This is an example, there are tens of cases like this. So the question is, am I signalling to Google not to rank these pages, and is there something I'm missing with regards to strengthening product pages in this tour section? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ben100010 -
Penguin recovery, no manual action. Are our EMD sites killing our brand site?
Hi guys, Our brand site (http://urban3d.net) has been seeing steady decline due to algorithm updates for the past two years. Our previous SEO company engaged in some black-hat link building which has hurt us very badly. We have recently re-launched the site, with better design, better content, and completed a disavow of hundreds of bad links. The site is technically indexed, but is still nowhere in the SERPs after months of work to recover it by our internal marketing team. The last SEO company also told us to build EMD sites for our core services, which we did: http://3dvisualisation.co.uk/ http://propertybrochure.com/ http://kitchencgi.com/ My question is - could these EMD sites now hurting us even further and stopping our main brand site from ranking? Our plan is to rescue our brand site, with a view to retiring these outlier sites. However, with no progress on the brand site, we can't afford to remove these site (which are ranking). It seems a bit chicken and egg. Any advice would be very much appreciated. Aidan, Urban 3D
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | aidancass0 -
Need some expert help – My Client bought out competitor and now wants to completely duplicate the current site with the same stock & categories using the Competitor brand
I am the SEO consultant for a large online homewares store. This company currently ranks very well in Google. I can PM the domain name if anyone needs however i don't want to post it on this forum. The company has bought out a competitor and plan to use the same warehouse, same products, and same back-end system as the current site, so they want to completely duplicate the current website. Titles, meta descriptions, product descriptions will all be renamed/rewritten/reworded (however keep in mind there are not many ways to reword a 3 piece saucepan set) Pricing will mostly be the same (some difference though), images cannot be renamed, categories cannot be renamed... the structure of the site will be exactly the same... placement etc. (however will have different banners, logo etc.) I personally don't believe the new site will rank, because it will be too similar. Can someone please offer me a 2nd opinion... Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ryanlenton0 -
Why is my site not ranked?
Hey, does enybody have an idea, why my site www.detox.si is not ranked for the KW detox in www.google.si (Slovenia). It is being indexed, but it does not rank and i have no idea why. Best, M.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Spletnafuzija0 -
Duplicate content across hundreds of Local sites and they all rank #1
Usually when we discuss duplicate content, we're addressing the topic of penalties or non-indexing. In this case, we're discussing ranking high with duplicate content. I've seen lots of dental, chiropractor and veterinarian sites built by companies that give them cookie cutter sites with the same copy. And they all rank #1 or #2. Here are two companies that do that:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | katandmouse
http://www.rampsites.com/rampsites/home_standard.asp?sectionid=4
http://mysocialpractice.com/about/ The later uses external blogs to provide inbound links to their clients' site, but not all services do that, in fact, this is the first time I've seen them with external blogs. Usually the blog with duplicate copy is ON SITE and the sites still rank #1. Query "Why Your Smile Prefers Water Over Soft Drinks" to see duplicate content on external blogs. Or "Remember the Mad Hatter from the childhood classic, Alice in Wonderland? Back then, the process of making hats involved using mercury compounds. Overexposure could produce symptoms referred to as being" for duplicate content on chiropractor sites that rank high. I've seen well optimized sites rank under them even though their sites have just as much quality content and it's all original with more engagement and inbound links. It appears to me that Google is turning a blind eye on duplicate content. Maybe because these are local businesses with local clientele it doesn't care that a chiropractor in NY has the same content as one in CA, just as the visitor doesn't care because the visitor in CA isn't look at a chiropractor's site in NY generally. So maybe geo-targeting the site has something to do with it. As a test, I should take the same copy and put it on a non-geo-targeted site and see if it will get indexed. I asked another Local SEO expert if she has run across this, probably the best in my opinion. She has and she finds it difficult to rank above them as well. It's almost as if Google is favoring those sites. So the question is, should all dentists, chiropractors and veterinarians give it up to these services? I shudder to think that, but, hey it's working and it's a whole lot less work - and maybe expense - for them.0 -
How do you prevent the mobile site becoming a duplicate of the full browser site?
We have a larger site with 100k+ pages, we need to create a mobile site which gets indexed in the mobile engines but I am afraid that google bot will consider these pages duplicates of the normal site pages. I know I can block it on the robots.txt but I still need it to be indexed for mobile search engines and I think google has a mobile crawler as well. Feel free to give me any other tips that I should follow while trying to optimize the mobile version. Any help would be appreciated 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pulseseo0 -
Newish site dropped out of rankings - is this normal?
I've got a small, 3 month old site that was ranking for a few low-competition keywords. Then, yesterday, it dropped out of the rankings almost completely. The only way to find it is to google the URL/site name, and then it does come up. There are pages in the index, they're just not ranking like they did two days ago. I'm not doing anything black hat or even slightly shady - just writing articles and clean link building. Is this a normal part of the Google process? I've never seen it happen on any other sites I've been involved with.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | damoncali0