Web Blog of Greg Mathews

I am not going to name them of give the urls but I am getting pissed off with proxy servers that Google and other big search engines insist on indexing. They are a nightmare.

Recently I discovered one such proxy server that has 1500 pages indexed in Google, about 90% of them are actually dynamic copies of Yzoo.co.uk and it’s related sites. Why is this a problem?

1. They somehow tend to get listed in the SERPs higher than the original content, bringing less visitors to the real site.

2. The search engines appear to be comparing the proxy and original site and treating the original as having duplicate content and then removing it from the SERPs.

3. The proxy servers tend to remove all javascript code etc from the page, basically disabling ads being displayed such as adsense and then they place their own ads on the page, stealling ad revenue from the original site.

How can this problem be resolved, well first and most importantly the big Search engines should not even index these proxy servers, it would not be hard for them to do as there are give away signs in the urls of these sites.

As a webmaster you can redirect proxy server users to a ‘forbidden’ error message or a specific page informing them the site is not available via that proxy, but that takes time, you need to find the IP addresses of the Proxy servers and these can be changed easily by the proxy owners so you need to be ontop of it.

Something needs to be done about these thieving proxy servers and fast, it is getting stupid. I know there are reasons that people use them and I don’t like refusing them access to my sites but if the proxies they use insist on stealling from me then it is their problem rather than min