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Hi Dirk,

This should be a Google task to prevent her customers/users from those kind of hackers right?

Do you think that redirecting my iPhone 6 page to a new URL would help? I can imagine the hackers hijacked an URL, when I pick a new one and 301 redirect the old one to the new, will my own result show up again?

I already spoke with Google this morning and they are going to look after it.

Marcel

Hi Matt-POP,

Thanks for this opening, didn't look at it this way. All our domains got replaced by wearemesh in the cached page. The VWO code looks like ours, so do you really think they were testing? All of the source code is ours, also the canonical, only the domain got replaced by theirs..

We are using VWO but we are doing it by ourself. I'm not sure VWO is the problem.

This problem occured last Saturday. What we did on Friday is make our website mobile friendly for the scheduled 21st of April mobile Google update. Is this coincidence? The two companies who helped us with this change, made some changes to the canonical tags among other things.

A strange thing here is that a competitor has a same problem, wouldn't that seem like a conscious action (hack)?

@Patrick: We don't know them, for sure. If you go to the unkknown website, you see that they don't use our meta data, so that's the strange part.

Update: the domain www.wearemesh.com now redirects to www.ovsee.com, the same website you got redirected to when you click on the hacked result of the competitor I wrote about. The visual URL there is Finan.nl. This Ovsee.com looks like the perpetrator. But I still can't get a grip on it.. the other hacked result leads to www.planchemag.com which redirects to http://planchemag.fr.

What can I do to get my results back? I already filed a spam report in GWT.

Thanks again,
Marcel

Hi there,

Since last Saturday I noticed a big traffic drop on at least the following two pages:
http://www.smartphonehoesjes.nl/apple/ and http://www.smartphonehoesjes.nl/apple/iphone-6/.

I did some research and I noticed something realy strange. Unknown sites seems to hijacked my organic results by using the exact same page title and META description but leading traffic to another their domain. Look at those pictures: http://imgur.com/v6kglLU and http://imgur.com/Whx4l8K.

Edit: a competitor seems to have a same problem: http://imgur.com/Zzhter4. I just fetched both URL's in GWT as Google. In Bing there is a little sign of this problem too, so this is not a Google only thing.

Can anybody please help me here? This has cost me some real money since Saturday.

Tnx in advance.

Marcel

Thank you both. I think we should go for this solution.

Marcel

Hi there,

A little while ago I posted a question about the upcoming mobile update. I am convinced about the fact that I must work on a solution before the update rolls out since a substancial part of our traffic has come from mobile devices.

My current issue: our webshop host is not willing to cooperate with the best possible solution our mobile webshop partner proposes.

This was the plan:

This is the only possible solution now:

The element 'request.url' will contain the full desktop URL which 301 redirects to the mobile URL.

My question is: will google have problems with the 301 redirect which refers to the right mobile URL?

Thanks in advance.
Marcel

Hi Dirk,

That sounds great. Thanks for your help, I am going for action on this solution.

Marcel

Hi DC1611 & Matt-POP,

Thank you very much for your response. This one is clear to me, I have exactly 1 month to fix this. Mobile traffic plays a big part in our daily revenue so this is serious.

@Matt-POP: your advice is to go for responsive but I rather go for a canonical/ adaptive solution because a responsive website is not really an option (causes lots of other 'challenges'). Would you also advice to go for the canonical/adaptive way? The idea to exchange links in the source between mobile and desktop. Is will look like this:

The bold parts will be filled in dynamically.
So again (@DC1611): will the mobile page receive (some of) the page authority of the desktop version this way?

Tnx again.
Marcel

Hi there,

On April the 21st Google seems to going to update their Mobile algorithm. I have a few questions about this one.

• Our current mobile website is very mobile friendly.
• We block all mobile pages with a noindex, so the desktop pages have been indexed on mobile devices.
• We use a redirect from desktop page to mobile page when someone hits a result on a mobile device.

My gut tells me this is not April 21st-proof so I'm thinking about an update to make this whole thing adaptive. By making the thing adaptive, our mobile pages will be indexed instead of the desktop pages. Two questions:

• Will Google treat the mobile page as a 100% different page than the desktop page? Or will it match those two because everything will tell Google those belong together. In other words: will the mobile page start with a zero authority and will pages lose good organic positions because of authority or not?
• Which ranking factor will be stronger after April 21st for mobile pages: page authority or mobile friendliness? In other words: is it worth ignoring the 21 April update because the authority of the desktop pages is more important than making every page super mobile friendly?

Hope to get some good advice!

Marcel

Here I am again. I tested 47 META descriptions by adding the exact description to the upper content of the page. Google has picked up 45 optimized descriptions. Problem solved, thanks again iNetSEO!

Marcel

Hi Andy,

Thanks for your reply. I'm testing your advice. For five pages yesterday I added the exact META description to the upper content of the page. Then I fetched the pages in GWT as Google. Google has picked up the optimized META description now succesfully for four of five pages!

I am going to add more pages to this test.

Thanks, I will post the results of the new test in here.

Marcel

Hello,

Since Panda 4.0 has been launched, all of my optimized META description have been gone in Google.
A while ago, I posted a question about this problem here: http://moz.com/community/q/all-meta-descriptions-gone.

I know about Google's own will to decide which META description will be shown. And also about unique content of the descriptions. All pages did have an optimized description before Panda 4.0 and there were no troubles at all, what tells me there is something else going on.

I tested some things:

• Rewrote 50 descriptions to very uinique ones, only five got indexed. This tells me that duplicate content of the descriptions is not the problem (they have never been 100% duplicate, product type was a variable which was always different for each page).
• Removed cache in GWT and fetched again as Google, didn't help. I checked the pages I tested and they all have been indexed again without showing the optimized descriptions.

More information:

• The first time I changed some META descriptions and fetched the pages again in GWT, Google picked up my new META descriptions and showed them. A few days later, most of them disappeared again (so Google is aware of the description but seems to ignore it).
• Some pages show the optimized description when I change my search query (only a few, mostly the optimized description never got shown)
• Technique is ok. Source code shows the right optimized description. META robots isn't blocking anything except NOODP/NOYDIR (always has blocked those).
• Websites using the exact same CMS, website template, META descriptions (style and build-up), do not have these problems
• I compared elements like place of description in source code, usage of meta robots, og:description, crawl-delay in robots.txt, and special characters in descriptions between websites that are showing optimized vs. website that don't show optimized descriptions. I can't find any connection.

Something I noticed is a change is my Robots.txt file: my webmaster has added the following command:
Crawl-delay: 2

May this have to do with my problem? I guess it doens't.

I did some research and there are more websites that are suffering this problem beside mine. This tells me it must be Google (and so Panda 4.0) that is responsible for this change.

I realy want my optimized descriptions back. Does anybody have an idea what to do?
Thanks in advance.

Marcel

Hi Jane,

Thanks for your clarification. Since a higher number of people have asked about META description and title tags changes I guess this is a Panda effect.

I know what to do next, a lot of rewriting work.

Marcel

Thanks for your quick responses.

I am going to test further with some pages to see what is needed to do now. Still this is a odd change of Google, because the descriptions were clear to Google users and managed expectations right.

Can I conclude that this (for me) major META descritpion change is a part of Panda 4.0?

Something I noticed is that the description of the page I tested, got three lines of text instead of two. Three lines wouldmake things easier to make unique descriptions. I am testing with other pages now to see the possibilities of this.

Marcel

Hi there,

Since almost a week now, all of my optmized META descriptions has been gone in Google. The last few years Google has always shown all of the optimized META descriptions. My website is an ecommerce site (phone accessories) and all pages have its own unique content (url, text, title, description) and score well in Google. The META descriptions are created by using a template like this:

At [brandname] you find lots of [variable category product] * USP 1 * USP 2 * USP 3

All META descriptions differ from each other only by the variable category product.

Something tells me this is an effect of the Panda 4.0 update. I tested with a category page by replacing the META description for a 100% unique one. Then I asked Google (via Webmaster tools) to reindex the page. Today the new description got indexed. This means uniqueness is important.

My question is: how do I get the optimized META descriptions back? Creating real unique descriptions (means not using a template) for every page is very hard for a webhop since all category pages have the same message to tell (only difference is the type of product), I want to use USP's, and META descriptions of all productpages have been lost too (over 15000 different products).

Please help!
Thanks in advance.

Marcel

Yesterday another crawl failed. Moz's Help team told me on the 15th of November:

'Our engineers are looking at this now and I should have news for you today. Sorry for the delay, I'm sure we can figure this one out.' Since that day I haven't received one message from the Help team, very disappointing.

I'm missing the data of one month now and this is not acceptable.

Marcel

A new campaign for a new website we have just launched caused no crawling problems. This seems to tell there is no Gzip error at server admin side. Moz is working on this case so I hope to get a positive word soon.

Hi Joel,

Today I subscribed for a trial period with Raven Tools. This tool can actually crawl our website. This tells me that the issue is possibly not a Gzip error but an issue on Moz's side.

Gzip is a piece of technique which is not required for browsers to show pages. I suppose that Gzip is neither required for the Moz bot to crawl a site. A lot of websites do not use Gzip what should mean that they can't get their website crawled by Moz?

What possible solutions are there to solve this problem? Is opening a whole new account a solution? I suppose that some technical masterminds are working for Moz. Could you pass this case to them to get the problems solved?

I contacted our server admin again but they already told us nothing happened lately related to this problem.

Thanks again.

Marcel

I found out that hiding the navigational items caused the Google ranking problems. This has been solved now. Still there is no data in my crawl diagnostics report and it got updated again on the 6th of November. Two empty updates now.

Why can Roger bot only see two indexed pages? Can anybody help me with this problem? I need to see all the data again.

Thanks.

Marcel

Hi Joel,

Thanks for your reaction. I checked several Gzip tools and they are all telling me there are no problems with the Gzip on our website. I also contacted our server admin and I am waiting for more information now.

Another issue we are dealing with is that we have lost some (over 15 positions/ categories) of our organic positions since last Sunday. And new pages won't appear in the SERP (but will get indexed) where they used to gain a top 10 ranking one or two days after putting them online. Ofcourse with high quality content. It seems like Google are devaluating our pages for some reason. Since last Friday we have lost some organic traffic every day (10-20%).

Could there be a correlation between the Gzip error and the oganic position drops? I was thinking about: a Gzip problem will cause page load time problems (which we have last few days on the homepage) > page load time is a Google ranking factor > higher page load times means a drop in organic positions what means a organic traffic drop.

Another thing I was thinking about is a website change we have made last week. We hid some navigational items by just adding them as 'hidden items' in the source code. Since hidden content has been not done by Google guidelines, could this be a reason for the position drops? We undid this change this morning to hopefully regain our positions.

Could you help me further by thinking with me or giving me some new insights?

Thank you very much.

Marcel

Hello,

Since last tuesday there has been no data in Moz anymore. The error code for the homepage says:

'608 : Page not decodable as specified Content-Encoding:'

I checked this list http://moz.com/help/pro/why-can-t-rogerbot-crawl-my-site but it doesn't tell me more.
Hopefully anyone can help me.

Thanks,

Marcel