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]
C
header("Status: 301 Moved Permanently");
header("Location: [victims-site.com");...]
But there are a lot of people
just reporting sites with 302 FOUND - which is different. Does it still have an effect or should I gather that the 302 means that the victims site is not removed from google but starts to rank lower than it?
<edit>
Where/who at Google do I report this to?
[edited by: Brett_Tabke at 2:20 am (utc) on Mar. 17, 2005]
[edit reason] No specifics please. [/edit]
What a wonderful website the above is.
The guy actually specializes in the hijacking of other websites.
He uses adsense in his tactical pages and cashes in on clickbank as well.
For the webmaster gurus here, the challenge is obvious. Unearthing this guy and the server/host he is using provides a new dimension in the hijacking of website.
This guy is one or the worlds best and he is streets ahead of google and msn.
Do not be surprized if one of your sites that is hijacked by him. He is an expert in php and javascript, far beyond the ability of anybody in google and msn.
THE HIJACKER EXTRAORDINAIRE
[edited by: ciml at 10:20 am (utc) on Mar. 17, 2005]
[edit reason] No specific accusations on WebmasterWorld, [/edit]
IT HAS BEEN GREAT DISCUSSING THE 302
This is my last post.
Thanks for starting this thread. It is nearly 700 posts long. Hopefully it has captured the attention of some folks at Google, though I am not holding my breath. They have known about this issue for over a year and many many sites are still MIA. They will never be able to solve the problem algorithmically until they admit there is a problem.
Chris
Now I need to wonder - especially after looking at those e-books wether I should just delete my website and start scraping cash - throw in the towel so to speak.
Either that or sit here spending hours and hours providing content for others to cash in on.
Nope - I believe in integrity and truth - why throw away integrity for all the cash on earth? I may be broke but I sleep well every night. Esp after writing content for hours and hours.
C
RewriteRule ^example\.html$ h**p://www.example.com/example.html [R=301,L] this way your server will never return a 200 always a 301 you can set up a .htaccess in each directory for the files in that directory.
