What the h*** is this?!

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kakizito

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Recently after seeing my ads have been clickbombed I have found a high drop in trafic to. I went to google and typed my main keyword to check if my site was sandboxed and instead of finding mydomain.com in the top3 as usual for over a year, I have found my site under a google app like user.appspot.com/mydomain.com ranking in the 2 spot where my site used to be.

Very strange because the title and description and even the site are mine, but my google analytics doens't track any trafic.

Mainly my site is under other hosting or something, can't figure this out.
Have I been hacked or something?

Could use some help as I have no idea what is going on here.

Thank you.
 
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Yes I can.
When I access that link from the serps the site is showing this:

App Engine Error
Over Quota
This Google App Engine application is temporarily over its serving quota. Please try again later.

And when I go to appspot.com I can see it's something related to google applications.

Very strange. Can't understand how can they use my site in that google app and remove my main url from the serps.
 
Looks like somebody cloned your site and put it in a google app account. And for your info it must be stealing a lot of traffic from you because Google Quota is very generous.
 
vloza said:
Looks like somebody cloned your site and put it in a google app account. And for your info it must be stealing a lot of traffic from you because Google Quota is very generous.
Click to expand...

Thats what it seems to me to. But how can they do it and remove my main site form the serps? Because what I can see is that mydomain.com was just replaced by user.appspot.com/mydomain.com.

I know they are stealing not alot of traffic but all my traffic because that app is ranked has it is my site. Can't understand this for real.

What can I do to revert something like this? contacting google?
 
Well.. we may have just found a way to eliminate competition from the Serps but our friend here is still screwed.

I think you would definitely have to contact google on this one. Go to that section of Google and see if there is a fraud complaint form? I~m guessing they have a fourm at least set up for it.
 
About the Google Quota. I think the guy who did this, must have turned it to the minimum, because when the result shows an "App engine error" I think it will rank my site lower because it's like my site is down.
 
Thats what it seems to me to. But how can they do it and remove my main site form the serps? Because what I can see is that mydomain.com was just replaced by user.appspot.com/mydomain.com.
Click to expand...

LOL

google doesn't want two of the exact same site ranking on the first page of google results. If anything they want a variety of sources for you to pick from. Since someone cloned your site, and probably slammed it with backlinks, google thinks that the two sites are probably the same, and that "version" of the site is a "better" match for searchers

I know they are stealing not alot of traffic but all my traffic because that app is ranked has it is my site. Can't understand this for real.

What can I do to revert something like this? contacting google?
Click to expand...

look up DMCA takedown request. best of luck.
 
Hmmm can't find any form to contact google about bugs or frauds, just the forums where nobody from google actualy reads.
 
google doesn't want two of the exact same site ranking on the first page of google results. If anything they want a variety of sources for you to pick from. Since someone cloned your site, and probably slammed it with backlinks, google thinks that the two sites are probably the same, and that "version" of the site is a "better" match for searchers
Click to expand...
I doubt this.
It looks like the site was hacked and hacker put 301 redirects for all requests with google bot user agent.
 
kakizito said:
How can I check that Bartholomew ?
​
Click to expand...

There's a "fetch as GoogleBot" option in Google Webmaster tools, under Labs category. Not sure how it will show the redirect though.

The best way would be to install "User Agent Switcher" plugin for Firefox, create an user agent with string
Code: 
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +[URL]http://www.google.com/bot.html[/URL])
and fetch yor site using this useragent.

Btw, his site is down but you still can to look up it in the google cache and check if the content of this GoogleApp site was identical to yours.
 
Last edited:
I saw the site up it was my site cloned! even in the serps preview you could see it is my site.

I m going to see if it has any redirects, because I believe it's more something like 301 redirects than google removing my site because doesn't want similar results. My site is 1 year old and has way more backlinks than it's app site, he wouldn't outrank me just like that.

His app site just replaced my site.
 
Btw I've just invented almost perfect plan to do such things for sites with no POSt functionality. it could be implemented very easily. Hack a site, put 301 redirect for google, create a script on target site (like googleaps in this case) which will just query the source site for any url requested by user.
You wont have even copy the source site and all news from source site will automatically appear on the target site.
It would be a bit arder to implement for POSt requests, but still very possible.
 
Put this on your website in the head section
It will only allow Googlebot to index the page, any fake googlebots including proxied googlebots will not get indexed.

This happened to a PR6 site of mine recently, it's been out of serps for 2 months now.. waiting for Google to reindex the proxy mirror sites and that should hopefully resolve the issue.

If you take a slice of content from your site and google it, you will more than likely be penalised as a duplicate (as I am). You will see the appspot domains rank ! Quite scary.

Hidemyass has been used for this also.

Code attached

PHP: 
<?php
    $do_noindex = 0;
    if (preg_match('/googlebot/i', $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'])) {
        if ($_SERVER['HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR']) {
            $ip = $_SERVER['HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR'];
        } else {
            $ip = $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'];
        }

        $name = gethostbyaddr($ip);
        $host = gethostbyname($name);
        if($host == $ip && stripos($name, 'googlebot') !== false) {
            // valid Googlebot
            echo '<!-- valid googlebot -->';
            echo '<!-- ' . microtime() . ' -->';
            echo "\n";
        } else {
            // not actually Googlebot
            echo '<!-- invalid googlebot -->';
            echo '<!-- adding meta noindex -->';
            echo '<!-- ' . microtime() . ' -->';
            echo "\n";
            $do_noindex = 1;
        }
        flush();
    }
?>
<?php
    if ($do_noindex === 1) {
    print "<meta name='robots' content='noindex'>\n";
    }
?>
 
"you got proxy hijacked"

Read a bit more about web proxy hijacking and thats precisely what happened to my site.

thx alot gshfgshf
 
Had this situation with one of my sites.

As far as I see, a proxy can't directly kick you out of SERPs just by itself — but if you get penalized otherwise it can take your place, and otherwise it can steal some of your traffic.

It's a nuisance, gshfgshf's solution nails it completely.
 
What is proxy hijacking?
Proxy hijacking works like this:
Google's web crawler Googlebot visits a website, for example www.theshadyproxy.com.
The domain www.theshadyproxy.com does not have any content. Instead of providing its own pages to Googlebot, the proxy scrapes your website in real-time. This is usually done by adding the URL of the other website to the proxy URL: www.theshadyproxy.com/scrape/yourdomain.com
Googlebot thinks that the contents of your website are actually the contents of www.theshadyproxy.com.
Your website will be removed from the search results and the proxy page will get your old rankings.
How to check if your website has been hijacked
Perform a Google search for a phrase that is unique to your page. You should use a sentence or word combination that only appears on your page and nowhere else on the Internet.
Put the search phrase in quotation marks. For example, if you want to check if there are duplicates of this page, you could search for the following phrase on Google.com:
"Ultimately though, what matters the most to me is control. I have a simple rule of thumb, which is that I don't put data somewhere that I can't get it back."
If there is more than one web page in the search results (your page), examine the other web pages. If some of them are an exact copy of your web page, you might have found a proxy that has hijacked your web page content.
What can you do to protect your website against proxies?
Some people recommend that you should block unknown IP addresses in your server configuration. However, this is very risky. Chances are that you'll also block Google and other search engines.
If there's a small error in the blocking code, your website will disappear completely from the search results because search engines won't be able to index your web pages. There will also be problems when the search engines use new IP addresses for the web crawlers.
For that reason, we recommend that you monitor your website with a service like CopyScape. If you find a proxy server that steals your content, you can block the exact IP address in the .htaccess file of your server.
Google has made great progress in fighting proxy spam in their search results. If you find a proxy server that steals your rankings in Google's search results, report it to Google. Chances are that this proxy server will disappear from Google's results.
Click to expand...

Wow this is some f***ed up shit.... Whoever came up with it was pretty clever, though.
 
Yep very f***** up. Millenium did you solve your problem? Most of the users on g support forum coulnd't have their problem fixed. Google emplyees there say it is a question of google algorithm to determine that the proxy site is more relevant than your site.
And even if you put the above code and allowing only the g bot to crawl your site most of the users saw the proxy site going away from the serps but never saw their pages back on the serps.
 
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