Google Indexing & Caching Some Other Domain In Place of Mine-Lost Ranking -Sucuri.net Found nothing
-
Again I am facing same Problem with another wordpress blog.
Google has suddenly started to Cache a different domain in place of mine & caching my domain in place of that domain.
Here is an example page of my site which is wrongly cached on google, same thing happening with many other pages as well - http://goo.gl/57uluq
That duplicate site ( protestage.xyz) is showing fully copied from my client's site but showing all pages as 404 now but on google cache its showing my sites.
site:protestage.xyz showing all pages of my site only but when we try to open any page its showing 404 error
My site has been scanned by sucuri.net Senior Support for any malware & there is none, they scanned all files, database etc & there is no malware found on my site.
As per Sucuri.net Senior Support
It's a known Google bug. Sometimes they incorrectly identify the original and the duplicate URLs, which results in messed ranking and query results.
As you can see, the "protestage.xyz" site was hacked, not yours. And the hackers created "copies" of your pages on that hacked site. And this is why they do it - the "copy" (doorway) redirects websearchers to a third-party site [http://www.unmaskparasites.com/security-report/?page=protestage.xyz](http://www.unmaskparasites.com/security-report/?page=protestage.xyz) It was not the only site they hacked, so they placed many links to that "copy" from other sites. As a result Google desided that that copy might actually be the original, not the duplicate. So they basically hijacked some of your pages in search results for some queries that don't include your site domain. Nonetheless your site still does quite well and outperform the spammers. For example in this query: [https://www.google.com/search?q=](https://www.google.com/search?q=)%22We+offer+personalized+sweatshirts%22%2C+every+bride#q=%22GenF20+Plus+Review+Worth+Reading+If+You+are+Planning+to+Buy+It%22 But overall, I think both the Google bug and the spammy duplicates have the negative effect on your site. We see such hacks every now and then (both sides: the hacked sites and the copied sites) and here's what you can do in this situation: It's not a hack of your site, so you should focus on preventing copying the pages: 1\. Contact the protestage.xyz site and tell them that their site is hacked and that and show the hacked pages. [https://www.google.com/search?q=](https://www.google.com/search?q=)%22We+offer+personalized+sweatshirts%22%2C+every+bride#q=%22GenF20+Plus+Review+Worth+Reading+If+You+are+Planning+to+Buy+It%22 Hopefully they clean their site up and your site will have the unique content again. Here's their email flang.juliette@yandex.com 2\. You might want to send one more complain to their hosting provider (OVH.NET) abuse@ovh.net, and explain that the site they host stole content from your site (show the evidence) and that you suspect the the site is hacked. 3\. Try blocking IPs of the Aruba hosting (real visitors don't use server IPs) on your site. This well prevent that site from copying your site content (if they do it via a script on the same server). I currently see that sites using these two IP address: 149.202.120.102\. I think it would be safe to block anything that begins with 149.202 This .htaccess snippet should help (you might want to test it) #-------------- Order Deny,Allow Deny from 149.202.120.102 #-------------- 4\. Use rel=canonical to tell Google that your pages are the original ones. [https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139066?hl=en](https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139066?hl=en) It won't help much if the hackers still copy your pages because they usually replace your rel=canonical with their, so Google can' decide which one is real. But without the rel=canonical, hackers have more chances to hijack your search results especially if they use rel=canonical and you don't. I should admit that this process may be quite long. Google will not return your previous ranking overnight even if you manage to shut down the malicious copies of your pages on the hacked site. Their indexes would still have some mixed signals (side effects of the black hat SEO campaign) and it may take weeks before things normalize. The same thing is correct for the opposite situation. The traffic wasn't lost right after hackers created the duplicates on other sites. The effect build up with time as Google collects more and more signals. Plus sometimes they run scheduled spam/duplicate cleanups of their index. It's really hard to tell what was the last drop since we don't have access to Google internals. However, in practice, if you see some significant changes in Google search results, it's not because of something you just did. In most cases, it's because of something that Google observed for some period of time.
Kindly help me if we can actually do anything to get the site indexed properly again, PS it happened with this site earlier as well & that time I had to change Domain to get rid of this problem after I could not find any solution after months & now it happened again.
Looking forward for possible solution
Ankit
-
Hi Ankit,
I already mentioned the files that were changed in our case: header.php, functions.php and some entries in DB.
Here are some links for step by step malware removal (don't depend on plugins for malware removal entirely)
http://securepress.org/tutorial-how-to-remove-malware.php
https://www.optimizesmart.com/malware-removal-checklist-for-wordpress-diy-security-guide/
http://hasibul.info/blog/2015/11/25/how-to-remove-malware-from-wordpress-sites/I hope this helps if the problem persists then contact me again.
Regards,
Vijay
-
Hello Vijay,
Did you face exact same issue? Also Is it fixed now? If so which particular files had issues & what kind of codes were added so I can look for similar codes
-
Hi Ankit,
We have faced a similar problem with one of our clients, it's almost always the malware code which remains hidden in functions.php or header.php or the DB or cache files which creates the problem.
Scuri or most of the security plugins will show the file as clean but the code remains hidden somewhere in the website, and re-emerges on when spiders/carwalers hit the website ( and for some users as well).
Please get the website code and DB reviewed properly.
It would help, I hope this works out for you.
Best Regards,
Vijay
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
-
How to Rank for "Interesting Finds" on Google Mobile?
Hi! Some of the sites I work with, when doing searches for their top terms, I am seeing some articles listed under "Interesting Finds". I have read some people thought it deals with AMP, others do not. Some thing it has to do with the structured data added to the page, some do not. Does anyone have a definitive answer on how to increase your chances of being listed here? Any example is attached. Any ideas? Uoi4Jyh
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vetofunk0 -
Linking from & to in domains and sub-domains
What's the best optimised linking between sub-domains and domains? And every time we'll give website link at top with logo...do we need to link sub-domain also with all it's pages? If example.com is domain and example.com/blog is sub-domain or sub-folder... Do we need to link to example.com from /blog? Do we need to give /blog link in all pages of /blog? Is there any difference in connecting domains with sub-domains and sub-folders?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Why is wrong domain being indexed?
We have 2 domains: revolve.com and fwrd.com (unrelated to each other, but hosted on the same server). If you do a site search for revolve.com but enter a designer brand that is only carried on FWRD (not on Revolve), the domain "revolve.com" pops up in the SERP, which is redirected to FWRD.com. Ex. https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=site%3Awww.revolve.com isabel marant Why is Google indexing the revolve.com pages, which don't actually exist? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ggpaul5620 -
Why isn't my site being indexed by Google?
Our domain was originally pointing to a Squarespace site that went live in March. In June, the site was rebuilt in WordPress and is currently hosted with WPEngine. Oddly, the site is being indexed by Bing and Yahoo, but is not indexed at all in Google i.e. site:example.com yields nothing. As far as I know, the site has never been indexed by Google, neither before nor after the switch. What gives? A few things to note: I am not "discouraging search engines" in WordPress Robots.txt is fine - I'm not blocking anything that shouldn't be blocked A sitemap has been submitted via Google Webmaster Tools and I have "fetched as Google" and submitted for indexing - No errors I've entered both the www and non-www in WMT and chose a preferred There are several incoming links to the site, some from popular domains The content on the site is pretty standard and crawlable, including several blog posts I have linked up the account to a Google+ page
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jtollaMOT0 -
Moving low ranking domain
I have a website, that I rewrote great content for, but I recently found that there are many, many links going to the subdomain that may be pulling it down. Has anyone had experience taking down a site and then moving the content to a new site? Will it be considered duplicate content if you completely take the old site down and use rel="canonical" on new site pages? I don't want to lose the good content, but I cannot have it on the current URL with all the bad backlinking (it's a complicated situation, as I need to keep those backlinks which are affiliates). Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RoxBrock0 -
Google lost 9,000 inbound links
I logged into GWT today. It typically reports that our page has about 9,000 inbound links, but today it said we have 225. There are no warnings or messages about any manual action. In fact, this site has never received any penalties or warnings. Since November I have used the disavow tool to remove porn links that a competitor has pointed at my site. Typically I go through Google's "new" links list and add any of the obviously bad links to the disavow list. That effort seemed to be going ok, and my site does not seem to be penalized for this negative seo. The 225 links that remain are scattered back through 2010. This site has been online since 2005 and has accumulated lots of links over the years. Some great, some not so great. Queries are down about 1500 per day since last week, about a 15% drop. There is a slight drop in some keyword rankings, but nothing huge, and most of the SERPS I track do not seem to be impacted. The PR is steady at 4, where it's been for years. So... what do you think I should do? Just watch it for a week and see if they come back? Try removing the "disavow" list just in case it some how messed things up (looks ok on the surface to me). Has this ever happened to anyone else?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DarrenX0 -
Do you bother cleaning duplicate content from Googles Index?
Hi, I'm in the process of instructing developers to stop producing duplicate content, however a lot of duplicate content is already in Google's Index and I'm wondering if I should bother getting it removed... I'd appreciate it if you could let me know what you'd do... For example one 'type' of page is being crawled thousands of times, but it only has 7 instances in the index which don't rank for anything. For this example I'm thinking of just stopping Google from accessing that page 'type'. Do you think this is right? Do you normally meta NoIndex,follow the page, wait for the pages to be removed from Google's Index, and then stop the duplicate content from being crawled? Or do you just stop the pages from being crawled and let Google sort out its own Index in its own time? Thanks FashionLux
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FashionLux0 -
Google Places Alternatives
Hello, I have been looking into Google places alternatives. Any suggestions? On a related note. I am based in the UK and looking to add a UK business to Bing Local but having read this thread ( - http://www.bing.com/community/maps/f/12264/t/653672.aspx -) I don't think it's possible. Anyone had any luck or experience? Cheers dj
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnW-UK0