Sudden Google Ranking Drop - Proxy Hijack

Tuesday, September 16th, 2008

Do you remember my article from yesterday about the sudden drop in Google search ranking for my friend’s website? Well, I just can’t stop thinking about it.

From what I have been reading, it seems as though my conclusion may be correct. At least I am hoping it is. If I ever conclude anything semi-concrete while thinking about , it’s a good day for me.

Ok, I found this very helpful and thorough website that pretty much described the exact problem my friend is having. It’s titled “Google Proxy Hijacking” and tells the whole story.

Here is what struck me as I think about this some more.

- My friend’s website has been live since 2004.
- The site seemed to be in the Google sandbox for the entire 4 years.
- For his most competitive , he was ranking past page 20 on .
- About two months ago, he made some changes to the homepage copy as well as an overhaul.
- About a month after that, the site ranked number 3 for his most competitive .
- The site ranked on page 1 of for about a month.
- The site now sits at page 25 for its most competitive .

Here is my theory. I think the website has been proxy hijacked for a number of years. This is what caused the poor rankings for such a long time. When the homepage text and changes were made about 2 months ago, visited the site and found it unique. ranked the site well, due to this new unique content. During the month, noticed the proxy website was now a of my friend’s website once again and dropped the website’s ranking.

Does that make sense? From what I read on the website I linked to, it does.

Here are the similarities with what we are experiencing and what the author wrote on the other website:

- My friend’s website has never been banned.
- We did a quoted for supposedly unique content on my friend’s website and a proxy website showed in the search results.
- The proxy looked like this: proxysite.com/cgi-bin/pxy/nph-pxy.pl/000010A//.friendssite.com/
- The proxy site was an exact of my friend’s website.

Now, I am not sure if this is what caused my friends ranking to drop, but all the factors are there. The we are talking about are very competitive, but the fact that his site showed so well in the search results for a month shows me that the potential is there.

I would appreciate your thoughts on this.

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Sudden Drop In Google Ranking

Monday, September 15th, 2008

A colleague of mine gave me a call yesterday morning with some rather upsetting news. Apparently, one of his websites took a in its . He wanted to know what could cause such a sudden drop in like this.

I really didn’t have an answer for him. The site has been alive (but in the Google ) for about four years. It always struck me as strange that the site was sandboxed for such a long time. It literally took four years to come from page 30 in the Google Rankings to page one. Suddenly, last month, the appeared on page one for its most prime keywords. Now, this wasn’t a gradual change in ranking, it was a huge jump.

The doesn’t appear to have anything wrong with it. I gave the entire site a once over. I checked the typical information and linking structure and found nothing wrong. The really hasn’t changed in months, besides the , so it led me to believe there are outside forces at work.

The question I have is, “Why would a , with a poor ranking, suddenly five on Google one month and then fall back to page 24 the next month?”

I tried to get some information out of my friend. The only thing major he did in the past few weeks is to add a custom 404 or Not Found error message. I checked the 404 page to make sure the headers were correct and not giving 200 results. They error 404 pages were fine.

Then, I went over to Copyscape to see if there were any copies of his . I have heard this can cause a sudden drop in Google rankings. I did find a proxy that had almost his entire cached and was trying to pull it off as its own. This wasn’t a typical proxy server trying to speed up the internet. This was something else…more like an proxy.

I looked in the log files to find the IP address of this proxy . I found it and blocked the IP address in his .htaccess file and then checked the proxy again. His no longer showed and was replaced by the Red Hat error page instead.

We will have to give this a few weeks to see if anything changes. I am now thinking that is something does change (for the better), this may have been what was causing the extremely long Google issue as well.

If you have any further suggestions, please let me know via comment.

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