I dont getit... why would someone place that in the title of a webpage? Or... that was placed by ... cobweb
This happened to me a few years back. Five years worth of original content hijacked by some kid who didn't know any better. Took me months to get him to remove all of it and for Google to take action. To their credit, Google finally did and restored me in their index.
http://www.cs.cornell.edu/people/egs/beehive/cobweb/sites.php LOL looks like biggest online sites know about this cobweb and use it with no problem. More info here http://www.cs.cornell.edu/people/egs/beehive/cobweb/ Anyway heres the people behind this: EMÄ°N GÃœN SÄ°RER Venugopalan Ramasubramanian ... check out this guy as he is having a @microsoft.com email adress Yee Jiun Song
Google knows about it since they probably are paying research money for it. It wouldn't be too bad if it was used for caching but nowhere should cob-web.org show up. NOWHERE! It should not be in links, titles, in SERP's! It seems that Google strated showing results from cache servers and treat it as real sites or subdomains to cob-web.org. Anybody using sub-domains? I am guessing that the way they have to fix it is to disregard every sub domain OR they have to manually go in and remove cob-web.org from SERP's. Google seems not too worried about it yet but it could be a huge problem if it isn't already. Maybe we just need to accept that our domains have been taken over by a cob web, right?
http://www.factbites.com/topics/IME shows a non-clickable url to a cob-webbed page. It looks to me like mmakers.org has scraped content via CobWeb/3.1 kupl1.ittc.ku.edu Dang those scrapers, saving someone bandwidth... http://www.google.com/search?q="Now...eeling+imprisoned+and+bad."&safe=off&filter=0 And pushing down the rankings of so many other sites using the same article... The example I gave before: http://www.google.com/search?q=tight+shiny+clothes as showing a cob-web url ranking well is not in the top 50 at last check.
Guys I think you are taking this far too seriously. I severely doubt that this is an attempt to "hijack" your site, nor that it is an "out of control" experiment (if nothing else turn it off...) If you are really bothered about people accidentally visiting the cached version (fairly unlikely I'd say) just put some javascript in your site's header to redirect, e.g. <script type='text/javascript'> var s = new String(window.location); if (s.indexOf("cob-web.org") >= 0) { window.location = "http://www.myoriginalsite.com"; } </script> Code (markup): The javascript will get cached along with everything else.
One thing is for sure - IP blocking won't provide a solution. Have a look at this page: http://www.cob-web.org/status.html and click on any link and choose Meridian Status - e.g. http://planetlab-9.cs.princeton.edu:3865/ See how many nodes are at work? Try blocking them all, and the ones that get added. What's interesting are the instructions on how to configure your browser to proxy through cob-web.org - http://www.cs.cornell.edu/people/egs/beehive/cobweb/instructions.php and how the technology actually works - CobWeb operates as a ring of cooperative caching proxy servers, each of which is capable of serving any HTTP request. When web objects are requested, they are fetched from their origin servers and inserted into the system. Through an analysis of web object popularity, size, and update rate, CobWeb then computes an optimal replication strategy for each object to provide low lookup latency. Get a glimpse of the future fellow webmasters.
And the url in window.location will get changed along with everything else as well... resulting in a loopback.
This is the future architecture of the web you are witnessing. It's called CoDoNS and it's about Replacing the DNS Hierarchy with Peers.
Very true Mc Fox but the cob-web is only one of many others taking part in PlanetLab. Here is some old news here and here.
And MC said "George, I’ll check out cob-web.org. Man, that’s a slow site." Guess he doesn't know it's a cache server and that google uses it
but all these servers and whatever they do should be transparent and not show up in search results at all with rewritten URL's. I still think that something went wrong and Google indexed the wrong things and gave a lot of sites a penalty for duplicate content. It's like a virus created at a lab that shouldn't have got outside the walls but did anyway and now it's spreading all over the world.
I don't know enough about it, but what ever happens I hope the following doesn't happen. As this site becomes alot bigger and every time someone uses it and visits a site it will mean that all the links contained within that site will have a cob-web domain attached to it. Now if you spam or are believed to have spammed or broke Googles Webmaster Guidelines they penalize you from their search results. Some people get hurt when they are not in the wrong. That doesn't matter so much if your site has traffic coming from other sites accrossed the web. Now if Google has control over that aswell as they are making the links on everyones site something like: domain.com.cob-web.org, then I have a feeling that Google will also do something so that it also makes them links either unclickable or will do it so they redirect to their own site or something. How I see it is this site is messing around with our sites linking structure and we have not given premission to do this. Although, I would just like to say that I have only mentioned Google above as people say here that they have invested money into this project or may have invested money into it and Google are the people that seem to be doing most to change the web and also try and own it.
This should work for proxies that rewrite the url in the same manner: Code removed at request of poster due to an error. The corrected one is here: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showpost.php?p=2181382&postcount=125 Code (markup): Change the number 25 to the number of characters in your full url, http through the end of your tld. Change the 26 to that number plus one. IF it reads a period at the end of your domain, it will redirect back to your homepage. You should have a 301 redirect in your .htaccess from non-www to www or vice-versa as well. It might loop if the visitor has set up their browser to use the proxy... I don't know.
You said you only mentioned Google and I just checked MSn which is not too bad with only 4-500 pages where cob-web.org is mentioned. I checked yahoo and they are as bad as Google. Check out http://search.yahoo.com/search;_ylt...hanes+fabrics+co"&ei=UTF-8&fr=yfp-t-501&x=wrt and look at result 2 and 3!! It's got to be great to have a cob-web link above your own
Google think this is a new trick to fool them? What exactly are we doing here? Just redirecting a subdomain from another site you your own? Will Googlebot read it? What happens if your site is indexed and you have this in your files when you are crawled?
It won't do a thing to Google, it's javascript. Someone might trip the qualifier looking at the cache in Google or something, but it's client-side. I see no problem for Googlebot. Google is going to pick up the cob-web urls as it crawls the web, but with no content to index. Cob-web.org has blocked that. Since Google does apply importance to anchor text, it will list those urls with titles of the anchor text it was found under. It will get some freshboost, but with no caching by Google and no content, it will dive into the bottom quickly. I'll agree that someone linking to you with a cob-webbed url does not give you credit for the link. It can mess up your forms, java, etc. But Google is not penalizing for these urls being found. From the Yahoo example you gave, Mike, I would wonder what is wrong with Yahoo in that they ARE caching the content, though the cache looks like a real mess they might not have picked up anyway... as with other examples given in this thread. Perhaps cob-web needs to look at how yahoo's crawlers are being fed content.
Apparently: From www.cob-web.org *Edit* Sorry I didn't realize this thread was quite old - I didn't read the full thread before posting... Oops
Agreed, the new infrastructure should of course, be transparent. I'm not sure if anything has gone wrong or if some testing is underway or what's going on exactly but it does give a nice glimpse at the future. It shouldn't make any real difference. I have no doubt that some canny webmasters will be able to use the cob-web url to give their sites a boost.
Is Google hacked as well? I got a "problems" message earlier at gmail and now I can't get Google or any Google related site loaded.