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]
Crobb305, Steveb:
- i used the "best page wins" only as a figure of speech. Clearly it is neither the best page nor the right page that wins in these hijacks. It's not even a real page, just a script.
>> fence
Just to clear up any misunderstandings: I don't like page hijacking and i'm not in favour of it. I don't hope any post has led to another conclusion, as i think i've stated this a lot of times in the past years.
Where i perhaps differ from some is that i don't see this as something that evil webmasters do to innocent webmasters. Some might very well do this deliberately, but most does not. Besides, there's an even more important point: While some will do this only for ranking it is very wrong to think of this as just limited to de-ranking other pages. This is a serious security flaw (or "an exploit" in security terms) and the error and responsability lies with the search engines alone.
Yes, you can easily make CNN advertise child pr0n with this, or set up a fake bank frontend, or whatever.
(theBear is sofar the only one that has picked this up in msg #524)
>> publicity
My post #54 of this thread is still available for republishing, so go ahead and grab it and do a writeup on top of it - that's easy, free, and relevant content for your site and it will increase the pressure on the search engines to do something about this.
I know of just a few that has done so already. Also, there's more coming up, it seems (but don't let that stop you from publishing your own writeups - we need this hole to be closed). My own writeup has a lot of details, including the word "exploit" - it was published only yesterday on my main site, but it's not indexed by Googlebot yet.
It may well be the lack of a response section that causes part of the problem.
This might even be considered a buffer usurp and execution of random html (oh boy, what fun)
However the response (as well as the status) is what the search engine should check. This is probably what is fouled up. If it were just a regular normal 302 it would be far more of a problem, and there wouldn't be the site spliting that is taking place.
claus,
all kinds of lights went on after looking at few things in gory detail. The real kicker is that the offending site can remove its links and Google will continue to keep the domain poisoned.
Googleguy is here to help with the small things website/google related and a big thanks for that.
That would hardly be setting a precedent since he has done this in the past with other problems.
Kaled.
GoogleGuy may not be able to comment, however, there is nothing to stop him opening his mailbox and saying, "please send me some examples".
My site has been buried in the SERPs since December 17th, for whatever reason. And I'm getting lots of E-mails from people telling me they are glad my site still exists, and expressing frustration over not being able to find it in Google.
These people are my customers, and Google's as well. I don't feel I've done anything to fail them, but Google certainly has. I'm now recommending they search for my site using MSN, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, or any other search engine. What does that say to them about Google?
It tells them that Google IS BROKEN! Every other search engine can't be wrong, and Google be right. When there is a unique page with unique content, and someone searches for that page using its exact title, it should come up somewhere in the Top 10 if it's the only page that matches the query, don't you think? That isn't what's happening.
I would think at the very least GG could advise that they are "looking into it." I realize silence is often the best way to protect integrity, but it's becoming fairly well known that something's not right with Google. I wonder if that's why the stock is dropping?
I have over 20 clients who have been affected by this and lost substantial business.
What can we do to denounce such activity?
Can we set up a bulletin board of known hijackers, names, IP addresses etc.?
Since a site of mine which previously did well has been hijacked AND copied and, of course, Google has pretty much given it the old heave-ho after a long time of great serps, I'm interested if this tag will help at all. Still riding the Yahoo serps, but slipping in MSN.
Does anyone have further thoughts about the 'noredirect' meta tag?
The major problem with a 'noredirect' tag is that it will mostly be used by a bunch of webmasters who read search engine related forums and blogs.
The wider population of webmasters will not know about the tag, so it would make sense for Google to look for a better solution.
boredguru,
Good observation but you are a bit late to point out the flaw in my suggestion. It was previously pointed out that other problems could arise.
However, Are you suggesting that the average site give way to the demands of the big boys like am**on? and what works for them is the most favored option?.
<snip>
Can you let us know if you have read this thread from top to bottom?
whoa there cowboy. the information from boredguru is probably some of the most helpful in the thread sofar. Nobody is admitting that we need to all start redirecting to dynamic urls as a solution. But for someone to say they havent been hijacked and they use a dynamic url generation for every unique user save googlebot is useful imo if your site is suffering.
A another way that you could do this is start a session on whatever browser criteria you desire to match and then write the ssid into a url- a well-used method on many sites. I'm curious if anyone has dynamic urls with things that have the ssid written into the url that are serpjacked.
