Directory Penalzation Round 2

CanadianEh, I have been looking into this issue with Malcolm and have found quite a lot of sites that have this penalty also have proxies which have cached the data. I have also found a number of directories which don't have a penalty and do not have any proxies caching their data, I will not post which directories they are, but they do exist.

I am testing on Directory Share to see if there is anything in this and only time will tell, but I do think it is worth my research thus far.

It is not always easy to find these proxies, but with enough persistence you will find that most directories have duplicate data because of them. What we have to bear in mind though is that the problem is not so much that the page has been cached, but the attack occurs when someone actually links to that cached page and then the crawlers pick it up.

Yahoo appears to be showing the proxies in their results faster than Google so I have checked on both. Here are the sites I have checked thus far:

alivedirectory.com - Google
dirsensei.com - Google
biz-king.com - Yahoo
sleekdirectory.com - None found
directorydump.com - Yahoo
directoryshare.com - Yahoo
avivadirectory.com - Couldn't find anything unique to search with
ewebpages.org - Yahoo
biz-dir.co.uk - Couldn't find anything, similar problem to Aviva.
zorg-links.com - Google
bestofthewebs.com - None found
bigweblinks.com - Yahoo

Ok, I'm done pasting in links but I assure you the list does go on.

I will also point out that this proxy hacking article was published for the first time on the 16th of August 2007. Before then I would estimate only a few hundred people new about the problem, both black and white hat.

Several of us then started seeing pages being dropped in Google around the end of August, just 2 weeks after that article first surfaced. A lot of people also reported increased bot activity as well as new sources of traffic... Could that be the linkage from the proxies was causing more bot activity to figure out the duplicate content? Who knows.

A couple of days later Dave_E opened his whoop ass thread.

Coincidence? Not sure, only time will tell. All I know is that there are a lot of haters out there who could have used this against directory owners and I would rather play on the safe side.

 

SilkySmooth,

It seems you can also find the proxy links for aviva and biz-dir.co.uk as well
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=aviva+directory&btnG=Google+Search

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&...iness+Directory"++++Biz-Dir.co.uk&btnG=Search

Best Regards,
Tuning

 

Thanks very much Tuning, always good to have some fresh eyes on board

 

What would be really ironic is if this all had nothing to do with a penalty but the OP got a penalty after that was seen.

 

mikey, I agree with your other comments... this however has me curious as to how you are implementing. I have noticed that a lot of the proxy services offer the option of stripping out the meta tags. Would this not be an easy bypass for your noindex?

 

Here is one for mainsearches.com Yahoo

I wonder.

Thanks Brian

 

It seems some one is really working hard to get Aviva Knocked out.
Today's search gives a new proxy URL as first result.

Today : schoolsurf.org
Yesterday : bhomiyo.com

I wonder what happened to bhomiyo.com result ?

Best Regards,
Tuning

 

There are probably a hole bunch of them. Google does not want to list them all so it has to decide which one to list. Today it chose schoolsurf.org.

 

I don't really understand how this proxy thing works.

Anyways, sounds fishy and probably is not too ingenious.

 

Neither do I but being a troll I am as suspcious as all hell.

 

Most of us probably do not have the resources to pull it off.

 

Wouldn't you have to have thousands of links pointing to the proxy page? Wouldn't this take some black hat magic. Wouldn't they be new, low quality links. I'm am guess it would take some skill that the average person doesn't have.

 

That's not enough to make Google think this is the original page and that the other one with thousands of links should be filtered.

 

So you are saying that when Google has to decide whether to index a site like Aviva that has been around for years and has tens of thousands of links it will choose a new proxy page with a couple of links.

Why would they? Remember that Google has known about this problem for over a year and have not been able to solve it. I believe that duplicate content filters would get it right in the simplest cases.

 

Its always about the cash... who has it controls all...
The grunts like me can never get anywhere regardless of standards, quality, integrity, honesty, or otherwise.

 

Any chance that this is damage control and a red herring?