Hi Dan,

Yes, the URL would change in both cases (AJAX request as well as for a complete refresh).

Thanks

Hi Dan,

Although it doesn't address the specific question I had I think your link is a good start for me to dig into the topic in more detail.

Many Thanks,

Hi,

I got a question in regard to webpages being served via AJAX request as I couldn't find a definitive answer in regard to an issue we currently face:

When visitors on our site select a facet on a Listing Page, the site doesn't fully reload. As a consequence only certain tags of the content (H1, description,..) are updated, while other tags like canonical URLs, meta noindex,nofollow tag, or the title tag are not updating as long as you don't refresh the page.

We have no information about how this will be crawled and indexed yet but I was wondering if anyone of you knows, how this will impact SEO?

We have the same issue however we have image XML sitemaps on each country subdomain's XML Index which point to the image files on images.domain.com.

Example:

https://uk.domain.com/image-sitemap1.xml

https://us.domain.com/image-sitemap1.xml

These 2 files are the same.

We also don't have a homepage on images.domain.com and it currently responds with a 404.

Do you think we need to create a landing page on the homepage and host the image XML sitemap at https://images.domain.com/images-sitemap1.xml rather than in each sub-domain?

Thanks.

Have you had any joy with this yet?

"If it is a very basic pure html/css site, you can pretty much achieve your goal." - Yes this is exactly what I need, I don't want the site to be functional and allow users to place orders (which could happen for non-JS users who don't see the notice that fills the entire screen). I don't want to do anything apart from rehost the site and put a big message up that says "THIS SITE WAS A SCAM - BEWARE OF OTHER SCAM SITES" and cannot be closed down.

"Do you obtain control over just the domain?" - Yes only the domain, not the hosting. We go through legal proceeding to prove the site is illegally selling counterfeit goods and obtain the blank domain.

"I understand your intentions are good, but the method is not complaint with Google's Guidelines." Fair point, but Google shouldn't rank these sites in the first place - they have no genuine links and should be banned already. Google aren't spotting this, so I have to fix Google's **** up. If the site gets banned I couldn't care less. Whilst they rank they serve a genuine purpose of (a) showing users that there are counterfeit sites and they need to be wary and (b) new sites have to better the SEO ability of the old ones in order to rank on page 1.

"Your goal is purely to manipulate search engine results which makes these activities black hat and subject to penalty." Yes but it doesn't matter if the domain is banned, it's not my genuine website and has no links back to my genuine site. I'm not going to host the sites on the same server as our genuine site so no risk to the company. Really I couldn't care less if it gets banned - the counterfeit sites are ranking due to black hat techniques - its in my interest for Google to eventually work it out and fix their algo as it will stop the hundreds of other counterfeit sites from ranking too.

"You can use every social media page, etc. If you put in the time and effort, these pages will rank very well in SERPs."

Yes I could, by building links to social media pages for the hundreds of search terms currently dominated by counterfeiters but this is not a good idea for two reasons:

1. Trying to rank social media sites for irrelevant terms isn't a good thing - you wouldn't do it for users if this situation wasn't happening. As you said already, this is a form of trying to manipulate SERPs and I wouldn't want to risk these genuine SocMed pages getting banned because of this.

2. There are hundreds of search terms to optimise for, and 8 remaining slots on Google to fill for many of these. These sites are also powerful in their SEO strength - 17 counterfeit sites made it into Majestic's top 1million sites by links - these sites have literally tons of scummy, comment box spammed links pointing at them and they are ranking (shame on Google).  Competing against these isn't possible via white hat methods and I'm not a black hat kind of guy.

My thought process is - Why try and compete against these sites (and waste A LOT of time and effort) trying to bump them down the rankings when they've already done the hard work of optimisation and link building for these terms? I could simply 're-use' them for a genuine purpose (making our customers beware of ordering from unofficial websites).

The previous owner won't sue us for re-using their content - that involves making themselves known to authorities and they'd get arrested in turn for their illegal activities.

I'm happy to debate it more as its an interesting subject and I don't want to waste time going down the wrong route, but I think re-using the sites is the best option - I just need to get copies of them so they LOOK the same to Google and hopefully keep their SERPs.

If you know of any software or techniques to crawl and download multiple (html) pages and images of a site then please let me know.

Thanks for all of the responses

FashionLux

Thanks for the response.

"you can download the the html but not the files themselves" - the html is all I need. I don't want the site to actually work so having only the html files is perfect.

I can go to the homepage and manually save it, and go through 100+ pages and manually download them - I just wanted to ask if there was any software that would do this for me and save some leg work.

Thanks again

Hi Ryan,

Thanks for the reply. To clarify, the site is deleted prior to me gaining control of it - by the time it comes into my hands it's completely blank, so FTP'ing isn't an option.

The site owners are essentially scamming members of the public by charging hundreds of dollars for goods that are never delivered. We've seized hundreds of sites through legal proceedings, but more keep popping up the moment we get hold of them.

These sites rank for hundreds of popular search terms (some have hundreds/thousands of spammy inbound links), so bumping them off page 1 for all SERPs isn't achievable.

By seizing the sites, keeping the content, but making the site non-functioning (imagine a popup image that fills the screen and can't be escaped) it will hopefully mean we own these SERPs and new counterfeit sites have to try and outrank them.

In turn we'll seize those sites, so the next wave of counterfeit sites have to do even more link building - eventually (maybe years) they'll realise its not worth it and give up.

Manually downloading individual webpages isn't an option, so I'm wondering if theres any programmes that can download all html files for a website so I can then just upload them via ftp once the site has been seized and add my javascript image

Thanks for all of the responses

FashionLux

Hi all,

I work for a large retail brand and we have lots of counterfeit sites ranking for our products. Our legal team seizes the websites from the owners who then setup more counterfeit sites and so forth.

As soon as we seize control of a website, the site content is deleted and subsequently it falls out of the SERPs to be immediately replaced by the next lot of counterfeit sites.

I need to be able to download a copy of the site before it is seized, so that once I have control of it I can put the content back and hopefully quickly regain the SERPs (with an additional 'counterfeit site' notice superimposed on that page in JS).

Does anyone know or can recommend good software to be able to download an entire website, so that it can be easily rehosted?

Thanks

FashionLux

(Edited title to reflect only wanting to download html, CSS and images of site. I don't want the sites to actually be functional - only appear the same to Google)