How is my competition causing bad crawl errors and links on my site

[ClaireH-184886]

We have a compeditor who we are in a legal dispute at the moment, and they are using under hand tactics to cause us to have bad links and crawl errors and i do not know how they are doing it or how to stop it.

The crawl errors we are getting is the site having two urls together, for example www.testsite.com/www.testsite.com and other errors are pages that we do not even have or pages that are spelt wrong or have a dot after the page name.

We have been told off a number of people in our field that this has also happened to them and i would like to know how they are doing it so we can have this stopped

Since they have been doing this our traffic has gone down by half

[AlanMosley]

I would look in Bing WMT to see where the links are comming from for a start.

i must say also, If you dont know how they are doing it, then maybe you dont know if they are doing it., it may be somthing quite inocent.

[ClaireH-184886]

the reason why i know they are behind it, is because other companies in the field of the website have had the same problems and after doing research for our legal team over this matter, we spent time speaking to over 40 people in the field of the website and found it happened to them aswell.

These people are cowboys but hopefully it will all be sorted out soon.

[AlanMosley]

If iit is happniong to many, then maybe its a reason not to suspect them, but like i say go to Bing WMT and have a look at where the links ae comming from.

[ClaireH-184886]

will do thanks

[RyanKent]

You mentioned these are crawl errors. Are you using the SEOmoz crawl report? If so, please look at the "referrer" field. It will offer the page on your site which is providing the bad URL.

If you are willing to share the referring page, we can take a look and possibly provide more detail.

Anyone can create bad links to your site which can appear in Google or Bing WMT. Only someone with the ability to add content on your site can create crawl errors. Either your site is open to user generated content and someone created a bad link, or someone with access to your web server created the content.

[ShaMenz]

Hi Diane,

Ryan's response is spot on and his suggestions are excellent.

If you can provide the URL(s), then we can take a look and see exactly what is going on with the referring page(s).

If you don't want to share the information publicly in the Q&A, you can private message each of us through your SEOmoz profile page.

If you ever think that someone has access to edit pages on your site without your permission, the first thing to do is to check with your service provider whether there are any active ftp accounts that you are unaware of. I have seen situations before where people have managed to get a "back door" set up and then it is as simple as logging in and changing pages without your knowledge.

Given that this involves a legal dispute, if we can do a proper diagnosis and trace the source of the errors (or if there happens to be a back door in place), then you would be able to:

1. issue a cease and desist
2. better secure the server against unauthorized access
3. Ban any ip addresses identified as malicious

Hope that helps,

Sha

[ClaireH-184886]

thanks for this, will send private message. we have had to redo the site so many times with new content because the content keeps on being stolen by a franchise group who then pass it on to their franchisees.

[RyanKent]

May I suggest planting a "bomb" in your content?

Most thieves are lazy. Rather then create content themselves they steal from others. Their laziness is dependable.

Take a look at their copies and determine what content is and is not being stolen. If they are copying everything including the HTML code and meta tags, you can add canonical tags to your site and other helpful code.

If they are not copying the meta tags, you can add fake content and use the noindex, nofollow tag to protect your site, but provide content which otherwise would cause a site to be removed from Google's index. When they steal the content, it wont have the noindex tag and the site would get nailed.

There are many other possibilities but I am confident you can outsmart them if you try. In addition, be sure to report the site(s) to Google: http://www.google.com/support/bin/static.py?page=ts.cs&ts=1114905

Another idea is to copyright your work, thereby protecting it and giving you legal proof the content is yours.

[ShaMenz]

Hi Diane,

I like the way Ryan thinks! ...but I am hoping we won't have to go to the length of having to resort to a content bomb.

The lesson in a situation like this is to realize that being a good white hat SEO unfortunately means needing an understanding of some of the tactics used by black hats or maybe just a little help from some friends

Since there is obviously an issue with your content being copied, the first thing I would do is to implement Authorship markup across your entire site. By doing this you ensure that any content that is "borrowed" is immediately "outed" to the search engines because it doesn't have an external link from your Google profile page, which acts as verification that you are in fact the author of the content. Matt Cutts and Othar Hansson have given a really easy rundown on implementation in this Google Webmaster Help video

For the moment though, it would be better if you can avoid making any changes to the site until we can identify all of the issues in play.

BTW ... I think I have an inkling of what might be going on here ... is there a programmer or designer who is or has been involved in the development of the site besides yourself?

In the meantime, I'm continuing with a diagnostic based on the information we have and will let you know as soon as I have confirmed my suspicions or otherwise.

Hang in there,

Sha

[ClaireH-184886]

Hi no there is only me who deals with the site. I have put copyright notice on the site but i will read about authorship accorss the site.