11 replies to this topic

[andruha]

I have a very weird and kinda crazy problem with Google caching one of the pages on the website. At first, I thought I got hacked or something similar, but the last time the .htaccess files have been edited is in 2010. I also talked to my host and they said there is nothing wrong with the hosting, files or websites.
PROBLEM:
Well, I noticed that my page lost all rankings and got deindexed, which was a surprise as it has been in the index for the past year+. I checked the cache of the page and it shows cached version of a totally different website!! This website is not on the same IP and is NOT MINE. I thought it will clear up on the next cache update, but it just did and its still this other website.
Another weird this is that if you check the cache of that website it shows a totally different blog on my hosting.

Here is how to recreate the problem:
Click: tinyurl.com/4ajvxy7 then copy the url you get and type this into google: "cache:www.theurlyouget.com" (not quotes) and you will see the problem.
What I tried to figure this out:
I tried "fetch as googlebot" and it shows the proper code. I tried many other tools online that crawl the site with different user-agents and all show the right code.
If anyone could help me, I would really appreciate it! I read some similar thread about this here, but none of them seemed to have solution.

[Jill]

Same thing happened for me.

Does Adscend Media mean anything to you?

The page that shows up in the cache is something different, but the text-only cache then redirects to an Adscend page.

Seems for sure there has to be some sort of hosting problem for this to occur.

What does your Google Webmaster Tools account show?

You know what's interesting also, if you view the cache of the page that shows up for YOUR cache, you get a whole other page.

I think there's some server hacking or something going on.

[andruha]

Thanks for the reply Jill! No one so far would even try to reply or look into this
Do you think its on MINE hosting or the hosting of that other website? Because I talked to my hosting and they said that nothing was edited in a while and can't be the problem. (maybe they just don't want to deal with the problem thought.)
GWT shows that I have almost 70k links from that domain and keeps caching that link instead of MINE..
I could imagine this happening on a domain level (DNS issues or something) or if the sites were on the same IP.. but they are not

Here is a pic of GWT:
http://i53.tinypic.com/s3q0b6.png

[andruha]

Here is what my host said:
(07:10:40 PM) Timothy Po: the entire site is not cached
(07:10:43 PM) Timothy Po: There is nothing hacked here
(07:13:26 PM) Timothy Po: This is a different site
(07:13:33 PM) Timothy Po: This is not your site
(07:13:41 PM) Andruha: Exactly, it shows a cache for a different site!
(07:14:00 PM) Andruha: No the page it should at all. Not my page, not even on the same IP
(07:14:10 PM) Timothy Po: Ok that is something you would have to take up with google because we have no control over that. This site is not hacked though
(07:18:38 PM) Timothy Po: There is nothing in this file to point to that site
(07:18:49 PM) Timothy Po: Did you ever maybe link to the site and google might of cached that
(07:19:06 PM) Andruha: Nope, never even heard of that site
(07:19:32 PM) Andruha: The funny thing is that if you check cache of that page it shows a different website too.
(07:19:52 PM) Timothy Po: Ok I am not sure then but this is not related with the hosting there is nothing in your account linking to that
(07:19:58 PM) Timothy Po: If you contact google they can reload the cache
(07:20:08 PM) Andruha: Do you know how I could do that?
(07:22:40 PM) Timothy Po: I believe if you have a google webmaster account you can control your domain cache
(07:23:23 PM) Andruha: Wouldn't this dump the cache of the whole website?
(07:23:58 PM) Timothy Po: I believe you can control the cache but I have never used google web master tools so I am not 100%
(07:24:54 PM) Andruha: so, are you sure nothing could have happened on the hosting for this to happen?
(07:26:02 PM) Timothy Po: Yes there is nothing wrong with this account I am not sure as to where google got that page for caching



The only resolution I see here is to block Googlebot from that page for few days. Then ping the page a bunch of time for Google to start crawling it again and hope it cached the correct page.
Question thought, could this affect my whole website? I mean the page already got deindexed so it can't do too much harm, can it?


EDIT:
Found another weird thing... this page is still getting traffic (according to GA) and it shows that it got like 40 views from a keyword.. but the link is no where to be found for that keyword and is not even indexed... lol wth?? It used to rank for that keyword.. but after this whole ordeal it got deindexed.
Oh and I added <meta name="googlebot" content="noarchive"> to this page and requested a cache removal in GWT...

EDIT2:
GWT now shows that the cache was removed, but when I check it still shows that website.. this is ridiculous

Edited by andruha, 06 February 2011 - 04:14 AM.

[Jill]

Is that other site hosted with the same hosting company?

There seems to be some relationship there, like you sell the same program or something like that perhaps?

[andruha]

Their website is hosted on a totally different IP from what I can tell and is not the same hosting company.
I see what you are saying though, we used the same advertising company.. maybe I should contact them, but I doubt they can do anything. However, they did have an outage few days ago, could be the reason for this mess up.
Ugh.. so confused

[Jill]

I think those pop up ads must do some sort of redirection or something like that.

[piskie]

Do the pop up ads insert themselves using frames or Iframes. If so, that could be where the problem is.

[andruha]

I believe they use JavaScript and not iframes... and I have removed them more than a week ago and requested a remove of cache.. yet it still shows the other page.

[piskie]

Only a week for a removal of cache request might not be long enough. Maybe somebody here can shed some light on that.

[andruha]

Something interesting happened, I just noticed that this page is now back in the SE and is ranking well. However, it still shows the cache from the unrelated page. I asked for re-inclusion in GWT and hopefully, it will cache the correct page now.

[chrishirst]

Something you should understand is that the page that is shown as "cached" is NOT necessarily the same page as the one being used for display (and position) in the SERPs and the cache servers are subject to the same fluctuations as the index servers are.