Back in 98 I had a site on their free host, which after developing I bought a domain for and moved to paid hosting. I replaced the index and a couple of other main pages with notices of the new addy and deleted the rest of the site. This left Web1000 with all of the 404 traffic, which is their business model. I was cool with that and went about rebuilding my link trades with the new URL.
Although the site has never been a "traffic magnet" it is narrowly niched, has exclusive content and converts nicely those that come from a search engine.
Recently Google traffic on this site tanked. While doing a search on my keywords I discovered that Web1000 had revived all of the URLs from the old site (including even menu frame URLs). In Google these results show excerpts from
my text from the old pages, my old link trades, my optimized META keywords & descriptions, the works. It looks just like all of my old pages spidered, but every one of them are actually redirects to a paysite. Of course Google thinks all of these need to be at the top of the listings while pushing the first mention of the
real site searched for
by name to the bottom of the 6th page (preferences set to 100 results per page
).
In Yahoo, the site still comes up in the first position when searched for by name (even without quotation marks) and none of these Web1000 gateway spam pages are listed. Hopefully this won't change...