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OF COURSE there are other ways. We've been doing it for 7 years without 302's. 302 is just one LAZY way.

I would add (as a complement, I hope):

Using the description provided by idonen, what is involved and how easy is it to "google jack"?

1) I own a domain that I want people to visit who would, under normal conditions go to my competitor's site when the click on my competitor's URL in a Google search result.

Q: Is that URL really going to fetch a page from my competitor's server? Not if I can get Google to think that I am my competitor ... so

2) I build a page on MY server that includes code that sends a 302 instruction to any spider that visits it. I don't want visitors to that page, just spiders. The 302 code says (in effect): "myCompetitorsDomain.com/index.html is now myDomain.com/index.html"

3) Googlebot visits and indexes MY page, as I have linked to it from a regularly spidered page.

4) Googlebot munches away, and indexes the information that myCompetitorsDomain.com/index.html has moved ... to my server/domain/page.

5) If my page can get a higher PageRank than my competitor's page (and there are lots of ways to temporarily gain a high PR through fake means ... who cares if it only lasts a couple of months? That's all I need for this trick.), then Google looks at my competitor's page as being less valuable than mine.

6) Google places a link to MY page higher in the results than my competitor's original page AND the URL and title and description in that link are EXACTLY the same as my competitor's link, EVEN THOUGH it now goes to MY server. Google just changed the internal pointer without modifying the URL/title/description, because they actually think I AM my competitor.

I have successfully fooled Google into thinking that MY page IS my competitor's page. Any hits on my competitor's search results for pages I have done this trick for now go to me, and my competitor's real pages drop further and further in the SERPS until they disappear. They are now out of business (at least for a few months).

As has been said: This is a Google programming policy issue.

It is not an issue, it is a severe problem. And many website owners and webmasters have seen their websites disappear into total oblivion in google or msnsearch.

In most cases the owner simply does not know who to talk to about this immense problem nor is there a descriptive authority to help rectify the matter.

Website within the top 30 of google for lets say 2 years. SUDDENLY disappears into total oblivion. Sales come to a grinding halt, telephones stop ringing, you wait for a few months, no change, still in oblivion, no keywords showing for the site, company name that is unique may show after gorilla suit category, wait a few more months......GONE OUT OF BUSINESS

You become a bit more experienced by reading this thread, you look closer in results of google, you see something you cannot believe, you thump the keyboard and split in two..... There is the culprit.....The snapshot that google took of a redirect script that pointed to my site..

You write to google, and they reply.

Our robots crawl 8,000,000,000 pages on a monthly basis. Please be assured that nobody can influence your raking in google. We update our index on a monthly basis. All new websites found will be reflected in our index.

You write back asking why another websites url contains my index page.....Google replies.

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Please note that our search results change regularly as we update our index. Normal changes you observe may include, but are not limited to, addition of new sites, changes in the ranking of existing sites, sites falling out of the index or getting dropped for particular keywords, and fluctuation between old and new webpage content.

We realize these changes can be confusing. However, these processes are completely automated and not indicative of wrong-doing or penalization of individual sites. We currently include over eight billion pages in our index, and it is certainly our intent to represent the content of the internet fairly and accurately.
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Perhaps you are not as close to the issue as many of us are. The problem does exist, and those of us who have manually removed dozens of 302s and tracker2s, etc can attest to that.

Haven't seen it on my site yet. Oh and the 302 redirect page that disappeared is back in the index.

Emmett, check for your site title or site:xyz.com, for new entries. They are not appearing all at once, but very quickly.

Another question: Are you saying that if someone provides a link for googlebot like:

"foo.com/cgi-bin/linkto.pl?target=yourdomain.com"

A) The redirect truly occurs, but Googlebot thinks that the content for this link is the same as the content at "yourdomain.com"

or

B) The redirect doesn't really occur - it just grabs your content and delivers it on the hijacking server?

I find it difficult to believe and coincidence that my top fours site all because hijacked at the same time. I believe that they became vulnerable to hijacking since I had a domain name server glitch.

which DC are you looking at?

cheers

I'm wondering if they maybe just backed out the last week's worth of updates via a backup restore or something, as a quick fix and since ours only disappeared within the last week, they are now back.

Not all BLs showing, so rank is a few lower than prior, but at least in the playing field again.

I am not seeing any changes on the queries/sites i am checking apart from the recent *normal* DC activity (big diffs in results and ranking).

the DCs seem to be very unstable/different at the moment, have you tried each DC to ensure it isn't that you are seeing?

some DCs will rank a domain number 1 for myuniquedomainname, some won't, this seems to have been going on since at least the beginning of feb.

hope you are right

Sceptic as I am I have to say I've just seen my site appear in the top 3 for it's domain name. It was previously number 70 with only thr URL displayed.

Also the pages appearing are the same ones which were linked to by the highest ranking hijackers (coincidence?)

What would be amusing was if G$ started counting the 302s as inbound links - it would be Karma anyway!

I just got google jacked:

www.SITE.biz/out.php?ID=#*$!

Redirects to my homepage

Now in google site: only returns the one page with their URL listed! (down from 3,000 pages!)

What do I do?

Something must have changed their end because I'd given up!

"Sceptic as I am I have to say I've just seen my site appear in the top 3 for it's domain name. It was previously number 70 with only thr URL displayed."

LOL - Now why didn't I think of that. Hope G does.

Our quantity of new additions have settled for the moment. Nothing new in last 1/2 hour or so. Sorta like a big plop followed by trickles. Still some missing. I've gone and re-submitted the rest (anyone else having trouble with the new squiggly graphic submit? I had to go thru AOL and get the non-squiggly version to get it to take anything. Otherwise I get a: "redirecting you to..." message followed by an error: The requested URL /about.html?q=http://www.mydomain.com/xyz.htm&dq= was not found on this server."). Flurry of Googlebot activity on affected domain stopped about 5:30am PST this morning.

Although I do not fully understand the technical complexity of hijacking, I do understand how it works in principal. I have had many sites either intentionally or unintentionally redirecting to my top four sites for some time. However, I do not believe this has had any major impact up until now. However, it is my supposition that I had a domain name server glitch back in January and this failure gave the sites redirecting to mine added weight and thus Google saw these sites as my sites. The direct consequence is that my top four sites are now in Google’s supplemental index in a state of perpetual dormancy and no longer get spidered.