Thread

Since I installed Expression Engine, I’ve been experiencing very strange search engine issues. At first my index got de-indexed because of the duplicate template url. Three days ago, Pagerank updated. It left me a little shocked because my site jumped to PR6, only to find out it had been mistaken for another website running Expression Engine. My backlinks have changed too, instead of showing relevant backlinks site:http://mysite.com now shows other Expression Engine sites which somehow seem to get counted as backlinks even though they don’t link to mine. At first I thought this was just a Google issue but it’s just too much of a coincidence that everything has to do with other Expression Engine sites. Does EE interlink all sites running Expression Engine?

Does EE interlink all sites running Expression Engine?

Certainly not. Do you’ve got a link to the site in question? What version and build are you running?

Thanks for the reply, I really doubted the interlinking but I can’t understand why this is happening and there is no information about websites being mistaken for other sites on the internet.

I’m running a personal version of EE (skeedio.com)
The index of my website is being mistaken for: http://www.webskills4u.com/index.php/publication/learning_ooo_win/
I also just received alerts that http://www.nemzetimuemlek.hu/ gets counted as a backlink to my website even though it doesn’t link to my website.

Sorry if my explanation is a little confusing but I don’t know a better way of explaining this issue. 😊

There are sites out there that “scrape” content from other blogs and get pageranked on the benefits of other people’s work. There are also sites that send phony referral pings so that they show up in your logs without having actually linked you. If these are the things happening to your site, it may not be an ExpressionEngine thing so much as a “<expletive deleted>ing <expletive deleted>ers <expletive deleted>ing over innocent people on the internet” thing.

Thank you so much McGehee, didn’t think of that before.
Is there a way I can check or prevent sites from pinging me?

Somehow I still doubt the pinging is the case, if it were then I’d still have all my backlinks from before switching to Expressionengine and the cached version of my site wouldn’t show another site running on Expression Engine.

Just so everyone knows, I love EE and I don’t think it’s harming my site. I’m just trying to figure out what’s causing this, I already tried asking over at Google’s webmaster group but nobody seems to have an explanation to why this could be happening. 😊

Is there a way I can check or prevent sites from pinging me?

One way is to check your referrer logs frequently—I might say obsessively, since I got almost to that point myself—and use the blacklist module to not only remove offending links from the logs but prevent future pings from them.

Another that I’ve opted for is to disable referrer tracking altogether; I find that for my limited purposes a third-party tracker tells me what I’m interested to know and somehow manages not to accumulate referrer spam the way EE’s logs seem able to do.

The best strategy I’ve found to beat “scraper” blogs is to simply not have enough content attractive enough to scrape, but others may not regard that as a viable option.  😊