Chinese Site Ranking for our brand name - possible hack?
-
Hello,
We have been notified in the weekly MOZ rankings that we no longer rank for our brand name, which is almost unthinkable as nobody would target it. When I googled it, there is a Chinese site ranking at number one and using our brand name and meta data.
What is very strange is that although our internal pages rank in the secondary positions, our homepage does not appear at all for the brand name. Therefore, I am wondering if somehow we have had some sort of hack and they are somehow redirecting to their own site?
The brand name is "uksoccershop". Has anyone ever encountered anything like this before or have any idea on what we should do?
Thanks for your help.
-
They send tons of links from other domains that have been hacked to the waldorf domain. If you check open site explorer you see that there are 100nds of links to a page type /style.asp - all with anchor text replica watches, probably the previous target. I guess they did the same thing for the soccer site - but that these links do not yet show up in open site explorer. Seem to be the only plausible explanation why this site would rank for another sites brandname.
Apparently Google' algorithm is unable to catch these quite obvious tricks (cloaking, spammy links, duplicate content,...).
rgds,
Dirk
-
I think you're probably right that the site has been hacked, but I'm not seeing where. It's clear that the ranking site, waldorf.org, has a redirect pointing to http://www.cheapsoccerjerseyhd.com/
Were you able to find anything about WHY the home page http://www.uksoccershop.com/ wasn't ranking, though? I don't see any redirects, links, noindex, or canonical tags on that page. It's live, so I can't figure out why it won't show in Google. Ran header checks looking for x-robots or something, still can't see problems.
Do you see anything in Webmaster tools? Warnings, pages that have been removed, change of address filings, or that someone's checked the option not to index the site?
Edit: Looks to me like you're just being outranked by a hacked site. I'd expect you'd still show up for your domain, but I guess not. Still Check WMT.
-
Hi,
Don't know exactly the technique they use - but they hacked the site - presented the content of your site to Google as you can see here: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:zFtvwoO5EhoJ:www.waldorf.org.za/foot.asp+&cd=1&hl=nl&ct=clnk&gl=uk - it's an exact copy of your site - so they present your site to Googlebot. It's not only the homepage - other pages are indexed as well: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:jC3Etl7Fd2EJ:http://www.waldorf.org.za/foot.asp?products/28122.html%2Bhttp://www.waldorf.org.za/foot.asp&hl=nl-GB&gbv=2&&ct=clnk
They implemented a 302 on the page (I guess based on referrer that redirects you to the cheap soccer site) - if you visit the url directly you just get an innocent linux install page.
File a complaint @Google & warn the owner of the domain that the site is hacked (the hackers also inserted spammy links on the normal version of the site) - would start with Google so you have proof about what's happening.
rgds,
Dirk
-
I'm not sure we have been scraped as such though, because the site in question has different content.
It looks as though the offending site has hacked another site (which redirects to the offending site) but the hacked site is ranking for our brand name. Our homepage has lost all rankings it had (our category and product pages seem fine) and has essentially disappeared.
Can anyone else shed any light?
-
I don't know anything about hacks, so I can't address that question.
The site appears to be South African. I would get in touch with them and tell them to take the content down. If that does not work immediately I would file DMCA with google to remove them from the Google SERPs if that is your branded content on their website, or your authorship or your images.
If only one site is doing this then you might be able to solve it easily. If it spread to multiple sites then you could be in for a problem.
-
Thanks for the reply, although that is a very scary answer!
Looking at our situation, do you think that is what has happened?
If so, what steps should we take to stop the problem getting any worse as a first step?
Regards,
Simon
-
Just a story...
I had a retail website and we started selling a number of outdoor products were manufactured in China. We spent a lot of time taking great photos to show the features of the products and writing our best content to describe and sell the product. Things were going great. We were ranking for generic product names (like "winter sleeping bag"), pulling in some traffic and making some sales.
Traffic into these pages started to slow, sales started to drop, and we wonder what is wrong. We go out into the SERPs and discover lots of Chinese websites (with English language content) had grabbed our content, our images and were now selling same merchandise or were simply displaying the merchandise with ads. These websites were all hosted in Asia. My website was being filtered from the Gooogle SERPs. There were not five or ten of these websites. Our content was on several hundred of other websites - all hosted in Asia. If you emailed them about content theft they would not respond.
My sales dropped to a really low level. The only people buying these products were entering my site for other keywords. These pages were getting almost no traffic from search. I stopped restocking this merchandise and eventually donated thousands of dollars worth of gear to my local Goodwill Industries. I did that because the amount of work to DMCA all of these sites was very high and that work might not result in getting them taken down and my site restored to a strong selling position.
Good luck. This is not an easy problem to solve.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Articles marked with "This site may be hacked," but I have no security issues in the search console. What do I do?
There are a number of blog articles on my site that have started receiving the "This site may be hacked" warning in the SERP. I went hunting for security issues in the Search Console, but it indicated that my site is clean. In fact, the average position of some of the articles has increased over the last few weeks while the warning has been in place. The problem sounds very similar to this thread: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!category-topic/webmasters/malware--hacked-sites/wmG4vEcr_l0 but that thread hasn't been touched since February. I'm fearful that the Google Form is no longer monitored. What other steps should I take? One query where I see the warning is "Brand Saturation" and this is the page that has the warning: http://brolik.com/blog/should-you-strive-for-brand-saturation-in-your-marketing-plan/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Liggins0 -
Imange name and html page name same are count spammy contents ?
Imange name and html page name same is count spammy contents ex. watertreatment - plan.jpg watertreatment - plan.html
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Poojath0 -
3 Wordpress sites 1 Tumblr site coming under 1domain(4subdomains) WPMU: Proper Redirect?
Hey Guys, witnessSF.org (WP), witnessLA.org(Tumblr), witnessTO.com(WP), witnessHK.com(WP), and witnessSEOUL.com(new site no redirects needed) are being moved over to sf.ourwitness.com, la.ourwitness.com and so forth. All under on large Wordpress MU instance. Some have hundreds of articles/links others a bit less. What is the best method to take, I understand there are easy redirects, and the complete fully manual one link at a time approach. Even the WP to WP the permalinks are changing from domain.com/date/post-name to domain.com/post-name? Here are some options: Just redirect all previous witinessla.org/* to la.ourwitness.org/ (automatic direct all pages to home page deal) (easiest not the best)2) Download Google Analytics top redirected domains about 50 urls have significant ranking and traffic (in LA's sample) and just redirect those to custom links. (most bang for the buck for the articles that rank manually set up to the correct place) 3) Best of the both worlds may be possible? Automated perhaps?I prefer working with .htaccess vs a redirect plugin for speed issues. Please advise. Thanks guys!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vmialik0 -
What happens when I redirect an entire site to an established page on another site?
Hi There, I have a website which is dedicated to selling ONE product (in different forms) or my main brand site. It is branded similarly, targets similar keywords, and gets some traffic which convert to leads. Additionally, the auxiliary site has a Google Rank 2 in its own right. I am thinking of consolidating this "auxillary" site to the specific product page on my main site. The reason I am considering doing this is to give a "boost" to the main product page on our main site which has many core keywords sitting with SERP ranking of between 11-20 (so not in first 10) Because this auxiliary site it gets traffic and leads in its own right, I don't want this to be to the detriment of my leads overall. Question is - if I 301 redirect the entire domain from my auxillary site to the equivalent product on my main site am I likely to see a large "boost" to that product page? (i.e. will I likely see my ranking rise from 11 - 20 significantly)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | love-seo-goodness0 -
My brand is not ranking on Android Google SERPs
In the new blog post here, she links to mobilemoxie, a site which allows you to do searches on various different smartphones. I tried a search for my brand, "ixl.com" on an iPhone 4 and a Android phone, the Motorola Droid X. On the iPhone, our brand appears in #1 like normal, but on the Android phone, our result doesn't appear on the first page. Any ideas as to why this would be the case? We're currently developing a mobile version of our site but we don't have one yet. Could that be the issue?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | john4math0 -
Rankings Dropped
Hello, I wonder if anyone can point us in the right direction. Our main domain name has got a good SEO profile the domain is 12 years old and we have some good reputable links. On the 7th of Jan our website dropped in the rankings from 3rd to 10th for one of our main keywords and from then onwards some of our other keywords have dropped. We have a lot of landing pages that target specific keywords which look like a template page but just with the content changed. Can anyone pin point what could of caused this problem or has anyone experienced this before and knows how to fix it. I personally think we have been hit by the panda. Thanks, Scott
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ScottBaxterWW0 -
Getting a site to rank in both google.com and google.co.uk
I have a client who runs a yacht delivery company. He gets business from the US and the UK but due to the nature of his business, he isn't really based anywhere except in the middle of the ocean somewhere! His site is hosted in the US, and it's a .com. I haven't set any geographical targeting in webmaster tools either. We're starting to get some rankings in google US, but very little in google UK. It's a small site anyway, and he'd prefer not to have too much content on the site saying he's UK based as he's not really based anywhere. Any ideas on how best to approach this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PerchDigital0 -
New domain name for existing site
Hi all, Our business has aquired a new domain name because there are several organisations closely related to ours that use similar domain names to target a niche group of users. We would like to use this new domain name to link to an existing website with content targeted at this user group as we feel that they will be more comfortable getting to the content via this new URL. After a useful search in these forums the majority of SEOMOZ gurus suggest that the new URL should be redirected to our current site using a 301 and we are happy to do this. However do we have to link the URL to our homepage or is it acceptable to link to a subfolder within the domain and then targeting content on this page to the user niche? Thanks for any input. Kind regards. Edit 11:38 The old url is oldcommunity.charity.com (we know having a subdomain is bad) this is where we manage all community engagement. The new url is www.newparticularcommunity.com and we would redirect this to oldcommunity.charity.com. The reason we have bought www.oldparticularcommunity.com is because the url is used by other charities for community engagement and is recognised by the community we are targeting. We are redirecting to our old site because we do not want to engage with them on this new url as our old site oldcommunity.charity.com already does this and can cater for the new community and perhaps they haven't realised that we can.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tgraham0