Net Benefit appears to have Hijacked 10000’s of it’s client sites, take a look at this site islandmeadow.co.uk in Google you will see the netbenefit site, well try this search that’s alot of sites! Each of them now have:
a) dupe content problems
b) ctr problem I would click on a link like that way to spammy
OK so thats a URL sample But I was Pinged today by Peter the veteran SEO at search engine serious his client that was ranking top 10 in google for his primary keywords has been replaced by the net benefit hosting account.
-DaveN
And now, a word from our programmer
To me it’s clear how this has happened. The “vs” in the URL stands for virtual server - these are all dynamically created virtualised servers which are then given an automatic domain name such as web17659 for Linux, nt17659 for Windows (Windows VMs?!? How much money?!). The problem is, these apache servers haven’t had their virtual hosting set up properly.
With Apache virtual hosting, if non of your vhosts match the Host header sent by the web browser, it just returns the first vhost defined in the configuration. On a good server like ours you’d get this - http://64.208.161.69/ - a defined page for every non-matched Host. Clearly netbenefit haven’t done this, so when people hit the sites on their virtual servers via their automatically assigned server address they get the first vhost defined, which usually happens to be a legit site (and then this happens) 
Two more points:
- Every server has a /stats/ dir but for some reason this one isn’t protected
- …someone’s been busy getting these indexed
-Rob
Added Peter updated his seo blog
8 Comments
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1
6th July 2007 @ 16:03
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2
I just found one that had a cache date of 3rd May.
DaveN
6th July 2007 @ 16:14
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3
Wow - that’s an epic screw up! 3rd of May?! Ouch.
Also - looks like that island meadow site has a little bit of hidden content.. Seems like they have a whole host of things wrong with them! (if you’ll pardon the pun)
6th July 2007 @ 16:45
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4
2 things, i liked what i seen when i clicked http://64.208.161.69/ - just tested it on a dedicated server i have with 123reg, got about 15 sites sitting on it, seems all i get is a 404
the other thing was comment 4 - that mob are driving me nuts this past two days!!!6th July 2007 @ 19:37
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5
Actually I was curious if anyone did try to get those subdomains indexed to sabotage the company’s reputation and from the looks of it noone had to do anything. It’s just one giant screwup by the hosting company. For example, take a look at this site http://www.connectglobal.co.uk/ all the navigation links point to netbenefit subdomains, obviously because the design uses relative URLs and the server is pointing at the subdirectories. So it seems that no outsider actually did anything to cause the problem and the hosting company is doing nothing to fix it.
7th July 2007 @ 18:21
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6
Several other hosts are not completely honest with their setups.
In know of another host that has the error pages (401, 403, 404) set up so that all error pages on your own domain are branded with adverts for their hosting service, but they do allow you to over-ride those in .htaccess with your own error pages — but most of the sites hosted by them have not done so.
Additionally any sub-domain (other than www, that is) that you care to type in will resolve to advertising for the hosting company again, and in that case it cannot be over-ridden at all. These cheap tricks are deceitful to their customers.
8th July 2007 @ 19:30
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7
[...] to Peter (a great guy :)) for pointing out the Netbenefit hosting problems to me and DaveN has written up a more in-depth look into the hosting [...]
9th July 2007 @ 11:12
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8
godaddy do the same thing too, I think all web host brands holding page one way or another. I get “under construction” page with Host jaguar myself when I first sign up but after you upload your website, all is fine.
3rd October 2008 @ 09:36
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Problems with the server wouldn’t really explain why sites like islandmeadow.co.uk are locked into a frame would it? Unless netbenefit set up the forwarding as well.