Google Proxy Hacking - How Your Page Rank Can Be Stolen & Pages Removed from SERP

I recently came across an instance of Google Proxy hacking with one of my clients, which removed his index page and other pages from SERP (Search Engine Ranking & Positioning) and he lost the page ranks (went down to zero). We were asked to protect his site against Google Proxy hacking, a really dangerous technique which can not only cause you to loose page rank but also remove your pages from SERP, all because Google cannot properly identify original pages from duplicates.

Google Proxy Hacking is a simple technique where bad guys duplicate your content using proxies and Google by mistake assumes their content to be original and penalizes your pages (duplicate content penalty) and removes them from SERP. The bad news is that proxies are easy to create and if you stop one, they can easily and automatically put up several more.

Duplicate content penalty is necessary for Google to maintain search relevance. However as we have seen above, it can be easily misused and turned against innocent publishers like my client.

Google Proxy hacking is a hard problem to solve, so I really don’t blame Google. I have some ideas, if Google is interested, to help them solve the problem.

After we implemented the protection on our clients site, we immediately noticed that several IP’s were masquerading as Googlebot and trying to fetch content from the site. Our protection is insidious in that it doesn’t directly prevent sending the content, though we easily can, but makes them useless for usurping SERPS. Now his site is fully protected against Google Proxy hacking.

It is amazing how easy it is these days to subvert genuine publishers and usurp their content, rather than spend the time and effort to be one. You need to be really careful and aggressively protect your site and content.

While investigating this issue I came across some such attempts, albeit of a minor nature, on our site too. I added a simple protection on our sites to block a cross-section of bad bots and proxies. We will soon provide the software so you can add them to your sites too.