I received an IM from a friend tonight who was quite distraught about a website he had received a link to http://www.serptimized.com I had glanced over something Site Pro News had sent me a couple days ago about this, but did not pay it alot of attention. Tonight I decided to see what my friend was fussing about, and I am astounded to say the least that Google has let something like this go on for so long! How serious of a threat is this stuff, and is it something we need to secure our sites against? I own hundreds of domains, so if this crap is real, then it looks like my summer vacation is going to be cut really short.
What could Google really do about it anyway? They've already banned the site from their own search results, so all they could do is start legal proceedings. It's probably not worth their effort, if they shut one down, more will just pop up. They are probably working on a technical fix, since this has been getting more and more attention.
What gets me is that everyone thinks this is a new problem... http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showpost.php?p=372735&postcount=157 It's not, the problem is open proxy servers, many of which are pulling ad revenue off of others content, which lessens the motivation for the proxy operator to fix the problem. AdSense and the Google Crawl Caching Proxy Servers exacerbate the problem. This may help in defending against the problem: http://www.seoegghead.com/blog/seo/how-to-guide-prevent-google-proxy-hacking-p210.html Here are some good links: http://www.seobook.com/archives/002420.shtml http://www.seofaststart.com/blog/google-proxy-hacking In reality, Google should be able to identify these problem proxy sites and ban them...
I have been doing a bit of reading, and this seems very legit ... the only question is how far is its reach? Many SEO sites are talking about this exploit ... but nobody is really saying how much of a problem it is. Why Google has not taken action is what really disturbs me?
why not?one of the reasons may be that the big G already has all the power, you know what happens if there is no real competition? In any domain, competition is a must, or people will start ignoring and abusing the power.
After all it's a working explicit and it could remove any domain from the main google index to the supplemental results, watch out webmasters.
Other DP Thread: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=446030 As old as 2005: http://www.darkseoteam.com/index.php/2005/10/06/23-open-letter-to-matt-cutts Shameful Google..
This seems like a REALLY BIG problem. I guess I have to pay better attention, because I didn't even know about it until now. Something like this could really poison Google's index, making them far less valuable as a search engine. Are they working on fixing this problem, or are they just going to wait until it's exploited on a mass scale?
Anyone stop to think if the known IP addresses do not match, the request to remove the URL would not work?? The Google engineers are not CS majors for nothing.
You are comparing apples to oranges ... The problem lies in the fact that it is not a 'request to remove' per se ... Google, since BIG DADDY, uses multiple datacenter indexing to determine overall rank and results, and even passes some of the decision-making down to the crawlers ... it is far more likely NOW than ever before, that your site can lose the coin toss with the proxied site for the dominant content. If the proxied URL can slip into ONE datacenter as the authoritative site, then your chances of having a crawler dump YOUR site as duplicate content just went up 10 fold ...
Ok first crawlers cannot make ranking decisions as it is left to another set of robots which are not involved in the crawl process. Next we will explore what is known as checks and balances and how they are applied in business. If you submit a site to google through Webmasters tools you must verify that the site is indeed yours via an meta tag added to your page or construction of a page which google names. This is a check to keep things balanced Now to remove a page it would seem to reason, there would be a check & balance in place. So for example if a request to remove the URL was in place a crawl of the server to indicate whether the owner removed the page would be a logical check IE URL removal request received: A crawl is done. Document found on server = No removal Document no longer found / blocked by robot instruction. = URL Removal Check & Balance As for the duplicate content issue... Google keeps a date of first inception on all documents. Therefore the proxied site would be the one receiving the dupe content filter.
This doesn't bother me a bit, google is a billion dollar company they would have something that would mess them up.
OK ... the proxy exploit is FAKE ... Sem-Advance says so! Dan Theis and Danny Sullivan are full of sh!t I guess ...
This website looks like a data mining operation - exactly why I can't tell - in fact I don't imagine the data has anything other then curiousity value. They are basically collecting a list of domains that people would like de-indexing, and probably also the IP address that made the request.
The thought occured to me, maybe G wants this problem to be left open, to "test" the webmaster "community". So, a few sacrifices have to take place, like getting a few "good" websites knocked out of the index, so what. If google can find "bad" webmasters or bad SEO folks, it is worth it to them. And, I think on their policies they state that google can not/will not be held responsible for indexing concerns. Something along those lines. Google is giant and has lots of gaps. I sort of doubt they are not aware of this problem, but then at the same time, maybe they don't and if they do maybe they are not sure how to fix it just yet without messing up all the data within the servers. It may not be an easy fix.
Keep telling yourself this ... looks like somebody is about a good year behind on his Google knowledge ... Makes for a great bedtime story, but the flaw to your system is that not even 4% of the results in Google are submitted by the sites' owner(s) ... Again ... your Google info is a bit dated. I AM NOT TRYING TO PISS WITH YOU MAN!!! I am trying to help you, and my fellow DP'ers -- this is a very REAL exploit that can have very real repercussions on those of us that make our livelihoods (or a good part of them) at the hands of Google. Educate yourself with facts - not assumptions, because everybody knows what happens when you ASSUME ..... http://www.seofaststart.com/blog/google-proxy-hacking http://www.sitepronews.com/archives/2007/aug/24.html
Seems to me you are missing the whole point of how this works. It is not a removal request, have a read here: http://www.sitepronews.com/archives/2007/aug/24.html I have had this happen to me before. Had to block the proxies from accessing my site.