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
-
Anyone come accross a completely random site name displayed in the SERPs?
Hello SEO friends, I am looking at a site that has a completely random site name displayed in the serps. The site in question is a hypnotherapy service and the site name is displaying as a commercial cargo airline! See the screen shot. Any ideas? There is 'local business' structured data on the site and it IS showing the correct business name. Is this a hack? Negative SEO attack? Random Google stuff up? Help! Very confused! Thank you for any advice! Sean!Untitled.jpg
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sean.e0 -
How get an image on a third party site rank high on goode images?
Hello, I have sometimes articles written about my product online, is there anything else I can do except make a good file name for it, perhaps I can ask the site owner to modify in the article to make it rank higher? Also on some small websites I can see that images rank very high for the specific search term that is difficult to rank for in images, if I were to contact the site with a sponsored post request, what I should make sure the site adds except filename to that sponsored post... I think there are also some other methods such as reddit to make images rank high on third party page, just need to find out how... thanks a lot
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bidilover0 -
Ranking go down why ?
Hello, Thank you , if you help us our web url www.prismpharmamachinery.com before some time very top ranking but now going down 5-7 pages in google any SEO expert can help for that Regards pooja
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Poojath0 -
Homepage not ranking in Google AU, but ranking in Google UK?
Hey everyone, My homepage has not been ranking for it's primary keyword in Google Australia for many months now. Yesterday when I was using a UK Proxy and searching via Google UK I found my homepage/primary keyword ranked on page 8 in the UK. Now in Australia my website ranks on page 6 but it's for other pages on my website (and it always changes from different page to page). Previously my page was popping up at the bottom of page 1 and page 2. I've been trying many things and waiting weeks to see if it had any impact for over 4 months but I'm pretty lost for ideas now. Especially after what I saw yesterday in Google UK. I'd be very grateful if someone has had the same experience of suggestions and what I should try doing. I did a small audit on my page and because the site is focused on one product and features the primary keyword I took steps to try and fix the issue. I did the following: I noticed the developer had added H1 tags to many places on the homepage so I removed them all to make sure I wasn't getting an over optimization penalty. Cleaned up some of my links because I was not sure if this was the issue (I've never had a warning within Google webmaster tools) Changed the title tags/h tags on secondary pages not to feature the primary keyword as much Made some pages 'noindex' to try and see if this would take away the emphases on the secondary pages Resubmitted by XML sitemaps to Google Just recently claimed a local listings place in Google (still need to verify) and fixed up citations of my address/phone numbers etc (However it's not a local business - sells Australia wide) Added some new backlinks from AU sites (only a handful though) The only other option I can think of is to replace the name of the product on secondary pages to a different appreciation to make sure that the keyword isn't featured there. Some other notes on the site: When site do a 'site:url' search my homepage comes up at the top The site sometimes ranked for a secondary keyword on the front page in specific locations in Australia (but goes to a localised City page). I've noindexed these as a test to see if something with localisation is messing it around. I do have links from AU but I do have links from .com and wherever else. Any tips, advice, would be fantastic. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AdaptDigital0 -
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 -
Lowercase Company Name - Impact on Rankings?
A company who spells their name in all lower case, uses their name spelled exactly this way in titles & meta descriptions & throughout all of their site's content pages - will it affect rankings (particularly since the company name isn't a recognised word)? For example, let's say the company is called "twintrest" Which <title>would be better:</p> <ul> <li><span style="background-color: initial;">A) </span><span style="background-color: initial;">Twintrest - It's Like a Twitter & Pinterest Cocktail or</span></li> <li><span style="background-color: initial;">B) twintrest - It's Like a Twitter & Pinterest Cocktail</span></li> </ul> <p><span style="background-color: initial;">I am leaning towards "A" because the crawler would recognise "Twintrest" at least as a noun, where as in B it could be misconstrued as a spelling mistake.</span></p> <p>Also, in content it would need to be italicised right? <span style="background-color: initial;">So both these would be ok:</span></p> <ul> <li><span style="background-color: initial;">You should use Twintrest because it rocks. or</span></li> <li><span style="background-color: initial;">You should use </span><em style="background-color: initial;">twintrest </em><span style="background-color: initial;">because it rocks.</span></li> </ul> <p>But not:</p> <ul> <li><span style="background-color: initial;">You should use twintrest because it rocks</span><span style="background-color: initial;">.</span></li> </ul> <p>Is it worth pointing out?</p> <p>I've noticed that jcpenny spell their name in lowercase and use this format in their meta tags, however, they are a well established brand. Is there any evidence to suggest that lowercase may even be advantageous since a lot of searches are carried out in lowercase?</p></title>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wojkwasi0 -
One site or five sites for geo targeted industry
OK I'm looking to try and generate traffic for people looking for accommodation. I'm a big believer in the quality of the domain being used for SEO both in terms of the direct benefit of it having KW in it but also the effect on CTR a good domain can have. So I'm considering these options: Build a single site using the best, broad KW-rich domain I can get within my budget. This might be something like CheapestHotelsOnline.com Advantages: Just one site to manage/design One site to SEO/market Better potential to resell the site for a few million bucks Build 5 sites, each catering to a different region using 5 matching domains within my budget. These might be domains like CheapHotelsEurope.com, CheapHotelsAsia.com etc Advantages: Can use domains that are many times 'better' by adding a geo-qualifier. This should help with CTR and search Can be more targeted with SEO & Marketing So hopefully you see the point. Is it worth the dilution of SEO & marketing activities to get the better domain names? I'm chasing the longtail searchs whetever I do. So I'll be creating 5K+ pages each targeting a specific area. These would be pages like CheapestHotelsOnline.com/Europe/France/Paris or CheapHoteslEurope.com/France/Paris to target search terms targeting hotels in Paris So with that thought, is SEO even 100% diluted? Say, a link to the homepage of the first option would end up passing 1/5000th of value through to the Paris page. However a link to the second option would pass 1/1000th of the link juice through to the Paris page. So by thet logic, one only needs to do 1/5th of the work for each of the 5 sites ... that implies total SEO work would be the same? Thanks as always for any help! David
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | OzDave0 -
Any Tips For putting up a new site and not loosing rankings?
We are switching one of our sites to a magento site and dont want to loose current rankings what are the best practices for this? Same Domain but the deep url pages will change urls
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DavidKonigsberg0