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]
Also as someone else said, Yahoo and MSN don't seem to have a problem with this.
The site that is hammering me with this is directory using a CGI script, is higher page rank, and has been on the net longer than I have, so they win and I lose. Of course my way to attempt to combat this was to create a new site which I did back in July, however it is sandboxed, so they win, I lose.
So the end result as far Google is concerned is they win, I lose and Google solution is buy adwords. Again they win and I lose.
Although many say Jack Daniels will do the same job for a lot less.
Free the 302s
Hijack This!
Amber alert ... missing website
Guess what... Do the same thing on yahoo and it comes up as a *link* to the site.
Seems like a simple solution to me. Just treat it as a link but don't pass page rank. When something isn't being used for the purpose it was created for you have to adjust.
Edited: Bad Grammar.
If index is a doorway then pagerank goes to index from the content it points to. At least thats how it's supposed to work.
This was found out and exploited by hijackers in 2001 and is now called 'googlejacking'
Google thought they could take the 'wait and see' approach and the 'spammers will cause their own downfall' approach.
I seriously thought the Alegra update would deal with this but apparently not.
The reason google handles 302's this way is to deal with the way the web was built (doorway pages) when they came on the scene.
Today the web is being built around googles policies. Maybe it's time to penalize doorway pages.
Sure you will be penalizing a lot of legitamate web pages but you can bet that if google did this, doorway pages would be a thing of the past right quick. At least webmasters would have control of their own destiny.
After all doorway pages used to handle by HTML what scripts could easily do today.
also for pages that are depecrated they could come up with a self-depecrating tag rather than a redirect that steals the fire from the previous location.
Hijackers could never exploit a self-depecrating statement.
something.com/jump.php?path=yoursite.com%2F
are all redirects potentially harmful? We've run many ads where we seem to find those kinds of links as referrals. Also, I thought engines don’t value redirects in their link popularity?
I think the negative publicity generated by webmasters picketing the googleplex is the way to go. We just need to come up with some catchy signs:Free the 302s
Hijack This!
Amber alert ... missing website
Picketing is a good start, but that could be ignored, what wouldn't be ignored is 4 or 5 people getting arrested for having a sit in at the googleplex, or at a google headquarter elsewhere.
I for one am willing to spend a few hours locked up for this (as an activist i've been jailed longer for less).
is anyone else willing to start organizing something?
If index is a doorway then pagerank goes to index from the content it points to. At least thats how it's supposed to work.
So the page itself goes to 0 pagerank?
That would explain why one of my sites disappeared when someone redirected to my home page.
Thanks for introducing me to the term "googlejacking". I'm finding lots more info on it now.
If this continues, google search will be nothing more than directory sites and scrapers. There must be some cutoff in the algorythm right now though. Otherwise you surely wouldn't see SERPS listing major sites like yahoo. Maybe they say, if you have more than X PageRank we won't allocate your PageRank/Listing to the referring url.
So, is the solution to get half a million backlinks?
1. pray to the google gods and wait for an answer before this happens to us.
(according to japanese guy the scumbags have already automated this exploitation so it's only a matter of time before we all fall victim)
2. automatically check referrals and deny anything coming from a 302.
(like shooting yourself in the foot since this is quite common)
>> If index is a doorway then pagerank goes to index from the content it points to
Reid, i believe you're thinking about the right thing but your wording is unfortunately wrong. It's not "doorway pages" and it's not "PR" - rather, it's "intro pages" (like flash intros, logo's and such) and "content". Google would take the URL from the "flash intro" and append the content of the page it redirected to (after the intro) to this URL.
" 2. automatically check referrals and deny anything coming from a 302. "
A very interesting thought. What would the .htaccess code be for this?
What are the upsides and downsides to such a thing. assuming it works?
The vast majority of links to my site are the honest <a href= types.
So, I'd lose a little traffic, but most of that would be via the scumbags.
Would there be negative impact on my page rank, # of incoming links,
or SERPs positioning? - Larry
The majority don't use redirects to hijack someone's page for PR and content they use them to track outbound link clicks.
It is Google that has the problem not some innocent webmasters that have been using redirects for years without problems.
Now how do I ban all those innocent outbound-click-click counting
webmasters without harming my own site? -Larry
