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]
[theinquirer.net...]
Only 17,700 results.
Not all are jackers but most of em are.
[edited by: Reid at 8:03 pm (utc) on Mar. 16, 2005]
sites began masking outbound links to prevent PR "leaking" from their pages and "reducing" their pages' importance to the Google algorithm. <snip> The main ways they did this was by cloaking the link in javascript (which Google wasn't parsing), but larger and more sophisticated sites used cgi and php scripts to redirect users to the final destination. Big sites like the Yahoo directory are good examples.
Yes, Yahoo is a serious cloaker, it's called CLICK THRU TRACKING.
You can teach someone to write, just not write right.
take a look intitle:302 found tell me what you think.
One url from a geocities page has a META refresh pointing at Google's homepage.
Your right cmil A LOT OF them seem to be legit but others...
Seriously though, a URL that has 'hijacked' another URL doesn't show in Google with '302 Found' in the title.
So we're seeing pages that:
a) have 302 in the title, because they are information or discussion on the subject or:
b) have 302 in the title, because they were intended to be redirects but for some reason they return 200 or:
c) have 302 in the title, are 302 redirects but Google interpreted them as normal pages
Note that a page that redirects now, may not have done when it was crawled.
By the way, allintitle: is sometimes more useful than intitle:
<added>
GOOGLE KILLED BY 302 REDIRECTS
I'm very keen that Google should should treat a link to a 302 redirecting URL as a link to its destination, but Google still has quite a lot of Web sites so I don't think it's dead just yet.
If you're referring to the fact that we redirect before the site leaves Alexa.com, but still deliver the visitors to the site in question, it is our right to use redirects to track where people go on our site and that
behavior will not be changed.
Got this bit of info from my Attorney...
I sent Brett a sticky. That may have the proper button to push in it.
And to all folks who think that all inurl: entries are hijackers if they aren't from your own site should go back to school.
ie: inurl:example.com returns:
Free Resume Example Learn how to write your own resume. Welcome to Free Resume Example. "For with God nothing shall be impossible." - Luke ...
www.domain.com/job-seeker-guide/ free-resume-example.htm - 12k -
Which has a standard html static href to a site that has example.com as part of its name.
example.com has not been hijacked by www.domain.com nor does it have any actual links of ANY type to example.com.
And to all folks who think that all inurl: entries are hijackers if they aren't from your own site should go back to school.
I agree with that.
I think the test to see if you are being hijacked is site:mysite hijackers will show up here. These should ONLY be pages from mysite with myurl.
also link:mysite none of my own pages should show here as inbound links. This is the site splitting phenomena.
The site split will like the page insertion show up in a site: search and maybe in a link search depending on the weight of the page.
woudl he go on the record if a reporter wanted to talk to him? We need real names, real stories to make this work
