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Google is linking to my wrong website

Discussion in 'Search Engine Optimization' started by VanoMano, Aug 4, 2009.

  1. #1
    My website has ranked high in my subject for 7 years. I left it alone for a long time, content to peruse other projects. But I noticed it had moved down to about 4 on google's first page, so I made a Digg on it and a few Tweets on the subpages to make it higher. It ranks #1 now, but it links to my website index and not the subdirectory the website is located on.

    Does anyone have any advice on how to fix this? I've thought of buying a couple of domain names just for that website subject and moving it, but it's been sitting where its at for years, would I have to start over and wait for Google to spider the content again?

    website in question: http://www.conijito.com/miu

    Man in Uniform, Leon Scott Kennedy from Resident Evil

    the website google links to when you search "Leon Scott Kennedy,"

    http://www.conijito.com/

    The results are varied with other search engines, I just want them all to lino the Leon website universally. When I have the time I'll optimize the URLs and all of the images, but until then I'll better optimize the meta tags and titles.
     
    VanoMano, Aug 4, 2009 IP
  2. coolamazer

    coolamazer Peon

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    #2
    Try setting up a redirect. If thats not working as planned then log on to your webmaster tools central and notify google
     
    coolamazer, Aug 4, 2009 IP
  3. VanoMano

    VanoMano Peon

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    #3
    Thanks for the suggestion. I would set up a redirect if I didn't have traffic going into the domain index, as it's my portfolio. Until the problem is fixed, I'm going to put a banner on the website directing confused individuals to the right place.

    I've never heard of webmasters tools central, looks like a forum or something you can join? I'll have to do this.

    Also, google is very hard to contact. Anyone have the best methods for reaching them? (phone, e-mail, any of this listed prominently anywhere?)
     
    VanoMano, Aug 4, 2009 IP
  4. BILZ

    BILZ Peon

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    #4
    BILZ, Aug 4, 2009 IP
  5. willybfriendly

    willybfriendly Peon

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    #5
    Google is linking to your website, but not to the page/directory that you want it to.

    There is little you can do to insure that Google links to the desired page. You could use the referrer data to direct visitors to the correct page with a bit of scripting. Simply parse referrer (Google) and query string. Same basic technique as you would use to cloak, but in this instance I don't think there would be any risk of running afoul of the Big G.
     
    willybfriendly, Aug 4, 2009 IP
  6. VanoMano

    VanoMano Peon

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    #6
    Looking up how to do this now. Thank you for the suggestion.
     
    VanoMano, Aug 4, 2009 IP
  7. Canonical

    Canonical Well-Known Member

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    #7
    First of all, though you may think of it as one, http://www.conijito.com/miu is NOT a website... http://www.conijito.com is a website. http://www.conijito.com/miu is simply a folder on or part of your website named http://www.conijito.com...

    I would strongly suggest that you NOT use scripting to show the search engines one thing and Google another when they request your home page URL. This absolutely is cloaking and if someone reports you then you WILL likely be penalized. There is no reason.

    Be thankful you have your http://www.conijito.com URL coming up #1/#2 (#2 for me) when someone searches for "Man in Uniform". There is a reason that http://www.conijito.com is showing up #1/#2 and http://www.conijito.com/miu is not even showing up as an indent in the SERPs at Google.

    You're going to screw around and not have ANY URLs showing up on page 1 when people search for "Man in Uniform". I would strongly suggest that you put your site's home page http://www.conijito.com back exactly as it was (including <title>)... And then focus on making http://www.conijito.com/miu rank for that term by building back links to it with the link text "Man in Uniform" in hopes that it will begin showing up as an indented listing to http://www.conijito.com for that keyword phrase. NEVER, EVER, EVER screw around w/ a page that you have ranking as well as http://www.conijito.com does.
     
    Canonical, Aug 4, 2009 IP
    maineexista likes this.
  8. VanoMano

    VanoMano Peon

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    #8
    I haven't messed with anything, mostly because I have no idea how to cloak anything. Nothing I like to bother with.

    What I'm so confused about is why it changed. Man in Uniform used to rank #1-#4 consistently AND it the link used to go straight to the "miu" folder index like it's supposed to. Google choosing "Conijito.com" over "Conijito.com/miu" is a very recent development. Conijito.com is not optimized for "Leon Scott Kennedy," The "miu" subdirectory is and has been for years.

    The change is jarring, people will be looking for Leon and Resident Evil but click through to something entirely different, a page with a rabbit on it. I'm going to work on optimizing the Leon website further (optimize every picture, more content optimization, optimized URLS...) and hopefully things will even out and go back to the way they used to be....
     
    VanoMano, Aug 4, 2009 IP
  9. willybfriendly

    willybfriendly Peon

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    #9
    While what I suggested uses techniques similar to floaking, if you re-read my post you will see that it is not cloaking, and is not showing one thing to the SE and another to the visitor - unless the SE is following its own query string URLs which is extremely unlikely.

    Rather, I suggested that the referrer information be parsed to determine if it was a SE query for specific terms, and that specific request be redirected to the appropriate page.

    It is not particularly difficult, nor is it particularly risky. If G truly wishes webmasters to build for the visitor and not the SE, then this strategy would be consistent with their stated goals.

    <?php
    $referrer = $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'];
    if (preg_match("/google.com/",$referrer) && preg_match("/Leon.Scott.Kennedy/", $referrer))
    {
    header('Location: http://www.conijito.com/miu');
    }
    ?>

    That example is untested, but should give an idea of how to go about it.
     
    willybfriendly, Aug 4, 2009 IP
  10. maineexista

    maineexista Peon

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    #10
    use this URL http://www.google.com/webmasters/ , follow those simple steps and get to work, google everyterm in there or simply search in theyr own webmaster tools help.

    you will find it very easy to use and very helpful

    great day to you ;)

     
    maineexista, Aug 4, 2009 IP
  11. Canonical

    Canonical Well-Known Member

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    #11
    On your conijito.com home page why not put a sidebar component or something highlighting your "Man in Uniform" sub-site w/ a link to it so that IF people click on the link to your home page in the SERPs that it is blatently obvious where to go to find the "Man in Uniform" sub-site?

    I thought you'd had changed some things on your home page because in the SERPs at Google I see:

    ROFLMAO @ "Well, shit- I fucked up"...

    But now your conijitu home page <title> is simply "CONIJITO.COM" which is likely going to hurt your rankings since <title> is the most important on-page SEO factor their is.

    Without going to Yahoo! and inventorying ALL of your back links, I can't say for sure WHY they changed which URL is ranking but my guess is that it has NOTHING to do with anything on your site or sub-site. More than likely your conijito.com home page has picked up some strong links where they used "man in uniform" as or in the link text.

    If you'd like to go through the exercise, here is a post I did a while back for analyzing and comparing the backlink profiles of two URLs.
     
    Canonical, Aug 4, 2009 IP
  12. VanoMano

    VanoMano Peon

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    #12
    I have a LOT "worse" things than my profanity to laugh at on my websites, bwahaha.

    I changed the title tag to simply "Conijito.com" again because I need the search engine to rank "conijito.com/miu" high again, not the index.

    For now, I changed the index layout to be more "Gender neutral" and added a button that directs people to the Leon Scott Kennedy content, with two promises of hentai on the index alone!



    I think two things could have happened to suddenly change what google links to:

    a) When I uploaded the Man in Uniform index to Conijito.com/index for one whole weekend, that was immediately spidered by google and I'm now suffering the reprecussions until an update. (How likely? Not sure...)

    b) The link to Conijito.com/miu/ content from digg.com and twitter somehow made Conijito.com prominent and not the subfolder, because digg places prominence on domain names? Something like that...

    At least unraveling the mystery with be a learning experience. That's my only consolation.
     
    VanoMano, Aug 5, 2009 IP
  13. dadeon

    dadeon Well-Known Member

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    #13
    Page Rank won't be transferred. A redirect will make you lose your ranking over time because effective it means that your page with the "ranking" does not have any content on it.

    I suggest you move your content back to the page with the ranking a.s.a.p
     
    dadeon, Aug 5, 2009 IP
  14. VanoMano

    VanoMano Peon

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    #14
    I haven't used a redirect. The subdirectory (/miu) with the related content has sat untouched. What would I need to move? Confused...
     
    VanoMano, Aug 5, 2009 IP
  15. Canonical

    Canonical Well-Known Member

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    #15
    Show me any documentation from w3c.org or Google or any search engine that says a redirect effectively means "that your page with the "ranking" does not have any content on it". It doesn't exist. In the case of 302 redirects it means the page was Temporarily Moved so the engines don't both transferring credit for links or replacing URLs in their index w/ the new URLs. In the case of 301 redirects, however, it means the page has been Permanently Moved so the engines DO transfer credit for the inbound links (and link text) to the old URL to the new URL... And because Google transfers credit for the link, it also transfers PR which is based entirely on inbound links.

    I just redesigned a PR7 site with 4000+ URLs back in December. It should be noted that my site has 4.7 million backlinks to it from external URLs according to Yahoo! Site Explorer that it's accumulated over the last 12 years. It took a long time to get to PR7.

    As part of the redesign we converted over to using a CMS which meant ALL new URLs would be extensionless. The old URLs were a mix of .html, .asp, and .aspx. EVERY page on the site had it's URL changed. Every new URL ends in a trailing '/' with no file extensions.

    I implemented 301 redirects on a page-by-page basis to tell the engines that each of the pages had permanently moved to a new location. Before the conversion I ranked #1 for MANY VERY competitive 1 and 2 word keyword phrases in one of the most competitive verticals on the web... some with as many as 180,000,000 or more results.

    When we cut over, of course, as expected I saw our old URLs begin to drop out of Google. The new URLs began to show up under site:mydomain.com. If you clicked on the new URLs as expected they showed "Page not currently ranked by Google" in the Google Toolbar, but this does NOT mean that they were not getting credit for the PR transfered by the 301s. It simply means that the LAST time Google issued a Google Toolbar PR update that those URLs did not exist, so they don't have a visible Google Toolbar PR which typically only gets updated once a quarter or so. They HAD a real PR which gets updated constantly.

    During the period that Google was recrawling all of our inbound links we saw a dip in traffic as we expected, and some of our URLs dropped significantly in their rankings. But within a week or two our new URLs even for the highly competitive terms began showing up on page 1 again. Google and the other engines had been recrawling other sites that linked to us, discovered each of the 301 redirects and transferred credit for those links to our new URL... Two weeks later Google just happened to come out with a Google Toolbar PR update. Our new URLs went from gray barred (Page not currently ranked by Google) to PR7 (home page), PR6 (1st level pages), PR5 and PR4 (2nd and 3rd level pages), etc. And have remained there ever since... and our rankings have actually been better since 2-3 weeks after we placed the 301 redirects in place than ever before... and remain that way.

    So don't try to say PR is not transferred by a 301 redirect. There is NO WAY we could have gone from "Page not currently ranked at Google" (no visible Toobar PR) to PR7, 6, 5, 4, or even 3 because of "new" links acquired during the three weeks or so after the conversion. It was SOLELY because the new URLs were getting credit for inbound links to the old URLs.

    301 redirects transfer credit for the old URL's inbound links (and link text) to the new URL and therefore passes PR. 302 redirects do not.
     
    Last edited: Aug 5, 2009
    Canonical, Aug 5, 2009 IP
  16. VanoMano

    VanoMano Peon

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    #16
    Fascinating mass of information you've acquired, there.
     
    VanoMano, Aug 5, 2009 IP