The Other Search Engines

**rotren** · 02-08-2005, 11:28 AM

On MSN and Yahoo search, when I search for the name h e a l t h e b o d y s h o p, a bunch of doorway/junk sites come up. The Google placements for this site seem to have gone down lately, and I wonder if it is because it's listed on a bunch of these crappy sites. They haven't used the complete domain name, the .ca or .com part is not listed on these sites.

Why is this happening? Could it be because the domain was owned by somebody else a few years ago and maybe ended up on bad sites back then? Some of this junk are totally inappropriate and link to pornography.

Example sites that have listed us, according to MSN: alkwad . admin . realgamble . us, http3a2f2fwww . bmned.com . uafl . org,
list . of . missing . children...,
xbfxcdxb7xb9xc1 . realgamble . us. etc... it's a lot of this junk.

What can we do? This has not happened to any other sites we have. We are also afraid of the possibility of being penalized in some way by search engines.

**sk8boarder2424** · 02-09-2005, 04:19 PM

well you wont get penalized by search engines... but im clueless on the actual problem

**neorunner** · 02-09-2005, 04:47 PM

This is what probably happened.
If you have ever used a ppc search engine (goclick is notorious for this) you get most of the traffic from their "partners". Most of these sites are sleazy trash sites, and the traffic quality is very low. What happens, is google will crawl the directory on these pages and it ends up showing as a click through on your site. When google updates its links, it shows these pages linking to yours.

Whatever it was, google seems to have removed the shady links. I didn't see anything that was naughty.