Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
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]
You can bet they know. Most all threads from WebmasterWorld hit the SERPS with uncanny swiftness. Yep, they surely must know.
GoogleGuy even said that he had brought it up in a G managment meeting....back in December.
"Perhaps we may think of a way to bring this thread to google's attention."
[edited by: 12monkeys at 6:47 pm (utc) on Mar. 11, 2005]
[edited by: lawman at 10:25 pm (utc) on Mar. 11, 2005]
[edit reason] No Specifics Please [/edit]
The targetted site must be called by telephone .."
That *sort of* takes me out of the game as I am in Thailand and contacting the west (put on hold, etc) is rather expensive.
Wouldn't an email tell us much of what we need to know?
slower but better: <snip>
[edited by: lawman at 10:25 pm (utc) on Mar. 11, 2005]
[edit reason] No URL Drops Please [/edit]
Also, we can find out what site is "hijacking" us, the problem is that in many cases we can't do much about it.
the difference from <snip> to <snip> ist that there you first have to know the suspicious links, but with the <snip> tool you are able to identify it. I don't know another way to do this. Problem is that only dynamic links are dangerous and they are not shown in the backlinks when you search for "link:mydomain.com". That would be a lot easier... But unfortunately they don't show up and so you have to identify them on your own.
[edited by: lawman at 10:27 pm (utc) on Mar. 11, 2005]
[edit reason] No URL Drops Please [/edit]
[edited by: claus at 7:15 pm (utc) on Mar. 11, 2005]
In this thread, the best bids sofar seems to be:always redirect non-www to www (or the other way round)
use absolute internal linking (ie. include your domain name in internal links)
include a bit of always updated content on your page (eg. a random quote, a timestamp, or whatever)
use the <base href=""> meta tag on all your pages
The kewords here are "In this thread, the best bids so far seems to be:"
There is no definite 'fix' or 'sheild' for this problem. These are only a collection of good suggestions that Clause gathered from the thread during our discussion.
They are all related to avoiding duplicate pages in google because it is the duplicate-content filter that is being abused in this case.
I was the one who sugqested the
<base href="">There are 2 ways to crosslink within your site.
1: Absolute links
2: Relative links
Absolute linking is when you use the full cannonical url in every single crosslink within your site. There is no question where any link points to.
Relative crosslinks: If the page examplea.htm is in the same directory as exampleb.htm you could make a link from a to b by simply typing
<a href="examplb.htm">link on page a to b</a><a href="../examplec.htm">Link from a to c</a>The
<base href="absolute canonical URL of this page">As far as using this META tag along with absolute crosslinks, kind of pointless but it MAY I repeat MAY help prevent hijacking, or at least cause the hijacker some work, because he would have to remove or alter that META tag in order to place the page in any other domain. Also he would have to fix all the relative links because they would mean nothing in another domain. And we all know hijackers avoid any kind of work for themselves, that is why they hijack.
As far as the 302 redirect problem this META tag "MAY" help. Because when google is deciding which page is the real page it also has this base reference which is absolutely clear that this page absolutely belongs at this canonical URL. But google only takes a 'picture' of the page so even though I use this META tag I'm seiously considering adding some dynamic content to my pages (a visible hit counter "MAY" work so that every visit to the page changes the content) that way every picture google takes is different in some way.
Welcome back to the 80's
[edited by: lawman at 10:30 pm (utc) on Mar. 11, 2005]
Something is definitely up at the 'plex. I just looked at the server logs for this afternoon and I am back at #2 for a particular <snip> term on Google... just behind the behemoth that has the term as part of their name for the first time in over a year. I hope this is a sign of things to come. ;)
edited in - especially #261 to #270
[edited by: lawman at 10:30 pm (utc) on Mar. 11, 2005]
Exposing a major, widely acknowledged weakness in Google to the wider public could cost many millions of real dollars. With tech stocks, speculation pushes values up and can push share prices down just as quickly.
I'm sure that they're getting nervous as MNS continues to march forward while Yahoo/Ink seems to be improving as well and the last thing they need is to have their reputation come under attack.
I'm not sure if there is a society of professional webmasters or not, but a credible watchdog group comprised of disinterested industry professionals looking out for our collective interests would be a good idea and could have an impact - a webmasters union of sorts. Remember, none of the engines would make a dime if they did not have FREE access to the collective body of our sites and published online work.
I'll spare you the part where I quote Marx, LOL.
So, someone could try to make a loop of 302 redirections of his url where the end and final content should be on the fifth position.
Of course the offending site could start linking from the middle of the chain, but this too could be probably solved by frequent dynamic url name changes from the second position in the loop.
[edited by: activeco at 10:44 pm (utc) on Mar. 11, 2005]
