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Many unethical webmasters and site owners are already creating thousands of TEMPLATED (ready to go) SKYSCRAPER sites fed by affiliate companies immense databases. These companies that have your website info within their databases feed your page snippets, without your permission, to vast numbers of the skyscraper sites. A carefully adjusted variant php based redirection script that causes a 302 redirect to your site, and included in the script an affiliate click checker, goes to work. What is very sneaky is the randomly generated meta refresh page that can only be detected via the use of a good header interrogation tool.
Googlebot and MSMBOT follow these php scripts to either an internal sub-domain containing the 302 redirect or serverside and “BANG” down goes your site if it has a pagerank below the offending site. Your index page is crippled because googlebot and msnbot now consider your home page at best a supplemental page of the offending site. The offending sites URL that contains your URL is indexed as belonging to the offending site. The offending site knows that google does not reveal all links pointing to your site, takes a couple of months to update, and thus an INURL:YOURSITE.COM will not be of much help to trace for a long time. Note that these scripts apply your URL mostly stripped or without the WWW. Making detection harder. This also causes googlebot to generate another URL listing for your site that can be seen as duplicate content. A 301 redirect resolves at least the short URL problem so aleviating google from deciding which of the two URL's of your site to index higher, more often the higher linked pagerank.
Your only hope is that your pagerank is higher than the offending site. This alone is no guarantee because the offending site would have targeted many higher pagerank sites within its system on the off chance that it strips at least one of the targets. This is further applied by hundreds of other hidden 301 permanent redirects to pagerank 7 or above sites, again in the hope of stripping a high pagerank site. This would then empower their scripts to highjack more efficiently. Sadly supposedly ethical big name affiliates are involved in this scam, they know it is going on and google adwords is probably the main target of revenue. Though I am sure only google do not approve of their adsense program to be used in such manner.
Many such offending sites have no e-mail contact and hidden WHOIS and no telephone number. Even if you were to contact them, you will find in most cases that the owner or webmaster cannot remove your links at their site because the feeds are by affiliate databases.
There is no point in contacting GOOGLE or MSN because this problem has been around for at least 9 months, only now it is escalating at an alarming rate. All pagerank sites of 5 or below are susceptible, if your site is 3 or 4 then be very alarmed. A skyscraper site only need create child page linking to get pagerank 4 or 5 without the need to strip other sites.
Caution, trying to exclude via robots text will not help because these scripts are nearly able to convert daily.
Trying to remove a link through google that looks like
new.searc**verywhere.co.uk/goto.php?path=yoursite.com%2F will result in your entire website being removed from google’s index for an indefinite period time, at least 90 days and you cannot get re-indexed within this timeline.
I am working on an automated 302 REBOUND SCRIPT to trace and counteract an offending site. This script will spider and detect all pages including sub-domains within an offending site and blast all of its pages, including dynamic pages with a 302 or 301 redirect. Hopefully it will detect the feeding database and blast it with as many 302 redirects as it contains URLS. So in essence a programme in perpetual motion creating millions of 302 redirects so long as it stays on. As every page is a unique URL, the script will hopefully continue to create and bombard a site that generates dynamically generated pages that possesses php, asp, cigi redirecting scripts. A SKYSCRAPER site that is fed can have its server totally occupied by a single efficient spider that continually requests pages in split seconds continually throughout the day and week.
If the repeatedly spidered site is depleted of its bandwidth, it may then be possible to remove it via googles URL removal tool. You only need a few seconds of 404 or a 403 regarding the offending site for google’s url console to detect what it needs. Either the site or the damaging link.
I hope I have been informative and to help anybody that has a hijacked site who’s natural revenue has been unfairly treated. Also note that your site may never gain its rank even after the removal of the offending links. Talking to offending site owners often result in their denial that they are causing problems and say that they are only counting outbound clicks. And they seam reluctant to remove your links....Yeah, pull the other one.
[edited by: Brett_Tabke at 9:49 pm (utc) on Mar. 16, 2005]
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.
Still not ALL back, but I'd say about 40-60%
Emmett, check for your site title or site:xyz.com, for new entries. They are not appearing all at once, but very quickly.
I did find one thing. My main money page was listed by both my domain and my ip address. Looks like I shot myself in the foot for dupe content on that one. I've 301'd the ip and listed it on my home page, hopefully googlebot will find it and update the listings. I may add some text to separate it from the old copy too.
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
dazz
You might not believe this, but check some searches in G right now. Unless I've been at this too long and totally hallucinating, our previously hijacked pages are showing back up left and right as I write. Maybe G has actually done something. Confirm anyone?
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!
[edited by: surfgatinho at 10:22 pm (utc) on Mar. 10, 2005]
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?
please sticky me if you can help!
joined:Dec 29, 2003
posts:5428
votes: 0
"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."
[edited by: walkman at 10:56 pm (utc) on Mar. 10, 2005]
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.
Interestingly, seeing some 301 redirected pages of our own (pages which we 301 redirected months ago to new locations on same or another of our own domains) showing up as URL only entries. Maybe they're getting rid of "non-existant pages" by changing ANY redirecting pages into URL only and making the destination ALWAYS the authority.
joined:Nov 1, 2003
posts:101
votes: 0
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.
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.
I want to know has anyone else experienced a similar situation as mine. All my sites are hosted with GoDaddy by the way.
I wonder if being on the same ip has an affect?