As Dan Thies points out in his blog entry on his SEOFastStart.com site, it is possible for the Google spiders to crawl “your” site’s pages through a proxy. The problem is that Google will then no longer see the real url as the correct url, but instead view the proxy’s url as valid. Your url will then be de-indexed by Google (and possibly other search engines). Imagine how many visitors could be lost because your site is no longer coming up in the SERPs (search engine results page)! Imagine also, how this could effect other areas of income if your PageRank drops to zero because of this!

They did notify Google about this over a year ago, but to date Google has done nothing. As time has passed, more advanced proxies have come into existence. These advanced proxies no longer pass the user-agent and other valuable information, making it even more difficult to prevent this from occurring.

How Can I Tell if I’ve been Proxified?

A simple test is to do a search for a keyword or phrase (or combination of phrases) that are unique to the page on your site that you are testing. If you find a duplicate page via the search engine then you may have been proxy hacked. A typical proxy url may look something like: www.example.com/nph-proxy.pl/655486/http/www.yoursite.com/

An Implementation Guide is available on Jaime Sirovich’s blog to walk you through some possible preventative measures.

Hopefully Google and the like take this seriously and fix it soon!