Moderator Note: Split off from thread as separate topic.

Testing Hijacking a Site (http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/showthread.php?t=3030)

From Google's Fact & Fiction (http://www.google.com/webmasters/facts.html) page:

The Nigitrude Ultramarine SEO contest that SearchGuild promoted, proved in public, beyond any doubt, that anyone can harm your site in google, if they know how. In fact there are several ways (not just one) to accomplish this.

Just because something is written on a google page does NOT make it a fact.
I am sure that another public demonstration of this google “glitch”could be arranged, if people really wanted to see it. But to be honest, the fewer people that know how this is acomplished the better.

If google were to admit that their algo is flawed and just about any page can be hijacked or removed from their index by ANYONE, that knows how, I think would the end of google as the dominate SE, so they keep their mouth shut and keep hoping that they can fix these problems before they do become common knowledge...
IDENTITY THEFT- Our identity was stolen for our business site and a competitive hacker put the user disallow text into the root server. It was only there for a week until we totally disappeared from the Google search. Almost every other search engine listed us as #1 and we were also # 1 with Google for years. We have been writing Google for three months and we have gotten no help at all! They said that it would take 3 months to spider the site again even though we immediately resubmitted. How can they possibly be that big and be that slow! Three months is an eternity on the internet, but now 3 months are up and it still says that our site does not exist when you key the URL into the Google browser. Even in the case of fraud , hijacking and identity theft they do not care!!!. We have almost three pages of back links (directories and news articles) linking to our site and that is what comes up when we key in the company name without the URL. Google clearly is not providing accurate information as a search engine if their right hand does not know what their left hand is doing. We need internet identity theft regulation or the hackers will continue!

The problem is that Google does not have a fraud department therefore they don't believe that the problem exists. Beside the hijacking issue all a competitor needs to do is to steal the identity of a companies webmaster get the codes and they are in. They put the robot user disallow into the root server and you are finished. Google offers no solutions and resubmitting does nothing. We have waited 3 months and Google still has not spidered our site. Google should not be a search if they can not offer solutions to help those who are defrauded. They could look at the cache of what was there prior to the hack and manually resubmit to where it was! However they don't do manual resubmission. We need to take action the same way that those who have had identity theft do!

I really wish that several of the techie wizards out there would get involved in this thread because it appears that that there are a number of ways that a hacker can take down your site. In our case I believe that the stolen identity gave the hacker direct access to put the user disallow text into the root server. But it didn't end there. When the access was sealed it appears that they hijacked the site and possibly spent the night spamming because something new happened. We were still #1 on almost every engine, but for a few weeks our site title said no index and the site description was blank. We cleared this up very quickly, however Google is still showing that we do not exist.

My issue with Google is that they provide a service to other engines and claim to be the top in their field. At the same time the general consensus is that they are the s-l-o-w-e-s-t and least accurate of all major search engines. They have a moral and B2B and B2C obligation to live up to their claims and not blame their bots for everything. They own their bots and need to be accountable for what they do. There is a huge amount of fraud on the internet and there needs to be a department to handle it and expedite claims.

Anyone who can help us get our site indexed on Google after a hack that happened 3 months ago PLEASE HELP!

We would be grateful for any help!

Anne :confused:

Weird. On SEVERAL occasions I have placed disallow all and Google came
back within a week or so after removing that. Try getting a few fresh links and e-mail webmater-at-google.com with
"Reinclusion request" in the title and explain things.

AnneTally: Well perhaps Googleguy will drop by and give us a hand with this one.

Weird. On SEVERAL occasions I have placed disallow all and Google came
back within a week or so after removing that. Try getting a few fresh links and e-mail webmater-at-google.com with
"Reinclusion request" in the title and explain things.

Thanks for your post. I wonder if the hacker did something else like tell it not to index for a given period of time. Anyhow, it has been almost three months now and Google has been no help. I have done everything but drive to their office in Silicon Valley, which I have thought of. If you have any suggestions they would be deeply appreciated! :)

Anne

I someone puts up the robots.txt and requests removal it's for 3 months. It used to be permanent but hasn't been for a long time.

I someone puts up the robots.txt and requests removal it's for 3 months. It used to be permanent but hasn't been for a long time.

Thank you for your reply. We have waited three months, but maybe it hasn't been three months from the last spider. Does anyone have a date when the last time that Google did a major spider?

Even if our site comes back next month, it doesn't seem fair that a hacker can kick your site off of Google for a quarter of a year. On the internet that is an eternity!

Anne

if the robots.txt is in the root and you request removal, I think it's permanent.
http://www.google.com/remove.html#exclude_website

unless you e-mail and get a real answer back..of course.


Thank you for your reply. We have waited three months, but maybe it hasn't been three months from the last spider. Does anyone have a date when the last time that Google did a major spider?

Even if our site comes back next month, it doesn't seem fair that a hacker can kick your site off of Google for a quarter of a year. On the internet that is an eternity!

Anne

There are two things here, if we read it over:

If you wish to exclude your entire website or a specific section (directory) of your server from Google's index, you can place a file at the root of your server called robots.txt.

To prevent Google and other search engines from crawling your site, place the following robots.txt file in your server root:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

This is the standard protocol that most web crawlers observe for excluding a web server or directory from an index. More information on robots.txt is available here: http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/norobots.html.
That is just the standard protocol and will technically remove a site and keep it from being spidered forever - if that disallow is left in there.

But the second part explains about requesting immediate removal:

Note: If you believe your request is urgent and cannot wait until the next time Google crawls your site, use our automatic URL removal system. In order for this automated process to work, your webmaster must first create and place a robots.txt file on the site in question.

Google will continue to exclude your site or directories from successive crawls if the robots.txt file exists in the web server root.
That is automated and can last forever if the exclusion is left in robots.txt permanently. I don't believe Googlebot fetches the robots.txt each and every time - I'm assuming this will instruct to fetch it and omit crawling the rest, resulting in removal.

If you do not have access to the root level of your server, you may place a robots.txt file at the same level as the files you want to remove. Doing this and submitting via the automatic URL removal system will cause a temporary, 90 day removal of your site from the Google index. (Keeping the robots.txt file at the same level would require you to return to the URL removal system every 90 days to reissue the removal.)
That part doesn't really apply, it's for sites that are below root level - like ISP sites that are in a subdirectory like example.com/~somesite/

Those have to be renewed because the server or domain doesn't necessarily belong to the same person who owns what can be a separate "logical" site in the sub. That's telling how they work with the robots.txt and sites removed under different circumstances.

No, there aren't regularly scheduled crawls in the same sense that there used to be, but once a site is out it can take a while to get the whole thing indexed, just the same as if it were a brand new site - which it is as far as crawling is concerned.

The best thing to do is maybe add some fresh content linked to from the homepage to encourage return visits; Google is fond of fresh content. And have links to inner level pages either external or from the homepage to important parts of the site.

Pages one click from the homepage seem to get crawled or "refreshed" rather quickly from what I've seen, depending on the size of the site. Two clicks away seems to take longer - so take it from there and see if you can get the most important pages one click away.

Marcia Your help is deeply appreciated!

Our site has had a total upgrade and we have resubmitted to Google, but there was some very valuable information in your post that we will start applying right away.

It is sad that search engines have no fraud department to assist those who have been hacked! Hopefully this will change!

Thanks a million! :)

Anne