Chinese Site Ranking for our brand name - possible hack?

[simonukss]

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.

[DirkC]

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

[Carson-Ward]

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.

[DirkC]

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

[simonukss]

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?

[EGOL]

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.

[simonukss]

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

[EGOL]

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.