I've been hijacked, what to do now?

[295mfk]

Hi all, this is my first post here, please don't mind my English, I'll try to be as clear as possible :)

Only today I found out about this Google bug, I was looking for info about Meta Refresh and 301 redirects (I need to rename and move a few pages on my site) but then I read an article from Pandia.com and got very worried.

I searched for a sentence only my site could have ("copyright 2004 [my site") and there it was! Someone had hijacked my site! I clicked the "Cache" link and this page was exactly like my homepage looked like a few weeks ago, only the logo was different. The spammer's website is [spammer's site].com, and my copied page was [spammer's site].com/links.php?ax=out&id=#*$!x There are a lot more hijacked sites there...

I contacted Google using their "Report Spam Result" form, and explained the situation.

What else can I do now? Should I contact this guy's hosting company? I have the spammer's contact details (Whois) but I'm still not sure of what hosting company he's using...
Can I put this guy's url here because it would benefit other webmasters or would this be against the forum's guidelines?

From what I've investigated so far, this guy is even trying to hijack GoDaddy...

[edited by: ciml at 6:59 pm (utc) on Dec. 30, 2004]
[edit reason] Examplified [/edit]

[kaled]

I'd recommend talking to the hosting company first. They have the power to pull the site completely - no one else can do that without going through the courts.

Kaled.

[zach]

i agree ive had more sucess getting rid of site hijackers with the host than any other method though i do start out chasing all available methods that i know of and one will usally come through.

[BillyS]

What else can I do now? Should I contact this guy's hosting company? I have the spammer's contact details (Whois) but I'm still not sure of what hosting company he's using...

Why not try to contact the owner of the website? There are lots of php based content management systems that use this approach to linking. Mambo, PHP Nuke, PostNuke to name just a few. There are off the shelf directories that use the same approach. Honestly, I have the same problem but I give the webmasters the benefit of the doubt.

Quite frankly the real problem is that of the search engines. Yahoo has problems with 301s and 302s. Google is a little better except for the problem you've got.

[295mfk]

Why not try to contact the owner of the website? There are lots of php based content management systems that use this approach to linking. Mambo, PHP Nuke, PostNuke to name just a few. There are off the shelf directories that use the same approach. Honestly, I have the same problem but I give the webmasters the benefit of the doubt.

Quite frankly the real problem is that of the search engines. Yahoo has problems with 301s and 302s. Google is a little better except for the problem you've got.

I've been hijacked by two webmasters, I contacted both of them, and now I'm sure that one is really hijacking my site and the other one didn't do anything wrong (on purpose), the real problem like you say is Google.

But that's a good advice, always give the webmasters the benefit of the doubt and then decide what to do.
Now I have to deal with the spammer's hosting company and hope they close his account ASAP, before Google removes my site from it's index :(

[iblaine]

Don't forget Yahoo:
[docs.yahoo.com...]

In my experience, Yahoo's copyright dept responds within a few hours.