Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
I used the email address as provided by GoogleGuy and included ‘canonicalpage’ in the subject line. Also included in each email were the specifics and details of the URL’s redirecting to my sites as GoogleGuy suggested.
Here are the Reply’s from Google:
Reply 1:
“Thank you for bringing this to our attention. We understand your concern about the inclusion and ranking of your site. Please note that there is almost nothing a competitor can do to harm your ranking or have your site removed from our index.”
Reply 2:
“If you are concerned about another site linking to your site, we suggest contacting the webmaster for the site in question.”
The two separate replies contradict themselves. The first reply is an outright denial that your site can be damaged by a competitor. However you could argue that “almost nothing” is a disclaimer.
The second reply from Google suggests that you can be harmed by a competitor and that the onus is on you to get the redirects taken down by the hijackers.
Unfortunately in my case, the Romanian and Russian sites intentionally using 302 redirects, using my title and description in their URL’s, and a cached version of my page, don’t answer their email, neither do their hosting companies.
[threadwatch.org...]
[slashdot.org...]
The second reply from Google suggests that you can be harmed by a competitor and that the onus is on you to get the redirects taken down by the hijackers.
No, the second reply says that if you don't like people linking to your site then ask them not to.
It says nothing about Google. Perhaps they're sick of you pestering them with the same question?
What they said is absolutely right. It's almost impossible to damage another site's ranking.
In most cases where people think their site has been hijacked with a 302, it hasn't actually been hijacked at all.
When other site's URLs appear in Google SERPs via a 302 redirect and contain my copyrighted information in their cache, have I been hijacked? When Google indexs a porn site an includes my domain name in the snippet, should I be the least little bit concerned?
There are those who say that "Google doesn't owe me anything." I believe that they owe me the courtesy of not telling people I run a gay pornography site, when in fact I offer educational resources linked to by many schools and universities.
Sounds like I have a problem. Looks like the problem is not on my sites. Seems like the problems are right there in Google's index...and nowhere else.
will an identical page ("hijacker") hurt another one ("innocent page"), when the "hijacker" is a supplemental page and the innocent page is not?
Thinking like we do is not far fetched or tin foil hat area. We see exact dupes of our index pages, and we know that dupe penalties exist. Why shouldn't we think that we got penalized because of it?
[edited by: walkman at 5:53 pm (utc) on Mar. 23, 2005]
Also why is it that when you type a full url www.adomain.com another url shows up with a redirecting to you, thats also not normal, then I dont care if it is 1 site or millions, its a bug.
OK now we know they want scraper sites
The problem is real, it's getting worse, and Google ought to care a lot more than it seems to.
There's a JUSTICE issue here, not just an economic issue!
When it happened to me I wrote about it in the private forum ... back in October 2003.
[webmasterworld.com...]
When I wrote to Google about it they didn't even give me the courtesy of a boilerplate form letter. Does that mean they're making progress?
That episode cost me several thousand visitors a day, for weeks. It was only fixed because a friend far more technically skilled than I wrote some code for my .htaccess file that would feed Googlebot a 404 if it followed the link from the redirecting site. Rankings and traffic returned to normal after Google picked that up.
Over the years I have seen many instances on numerous message boards of merchants with affiliate programs complaining that Google had picked up some affiliate's referral link and was ranking that instead of the merchant's real URL (at considerable direct cost to the merchant, BTW). I didn't used to be sympathetic to such complaints, but I am now.
It was only fixed because a friend far more technically skilled than I wrote some code for my .htaccess file that would feed Googlebot a 404 if it followed the link from the redirecting site.
Sounds promising Buckworks. Would you care to share that code with the rest of us? Please!?!
###
# Deny Bad Referer
###
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer "^http://redirect\.evilsite\.com/*" bad_url
#
<Files my-page.html>
Order Allow,Deny
Allow from all
Deny from env=bad_url
</Files>
### End Deny Bad referer
"Google doesn't send 'Referer'."
So, while on the surface it looks like they are stealing PR, traffic, etc. they are essentially doing damage to a site's reputation, which in many cases has taken years of hard work to build.
The burden here with a legal argument I would imagine would be the challenging issue of establishing intent, balanced with what degree of complicity that the serps have, in allowing what is essentially a (well-known) bug in their handling of 302s in the first place.
I am getting so sick of all these russian/romanian sites doing this to me, that I am going to consider going to the extreme of blocking IP access/redirects by geo-location. I dont get a lot of traffic from them anyways, so I could care less.
as an aside, I wonder if one could use this htaccess 301 trick to create a blacklist/wordlist, which contains the most common spam words (p.oker, h.oldem, etc) and generate 404's or redirects?
What they said is absolutely right. It's almost impossible to damage another site's ranking.In most cases where people think their site has been hijacked with a 302, it hasn't actually been hijacked at all.
Please offer proof when making blanket statements like this, especially in light of the huge amount of evidence to the contrary.
What they said is absolutely right. It's almost impossible to damage another site's ranking.
In most cases where people think their site has been hijacked with a 302, it hasn't actually been hijacked at all.
If you are going to issue blanket statements, please provide some evidence. You are simply quoting from the Google Terms and Conditions which means absolutely nothing...especially since they hedge by saying "...ALMOST nothing a competetor can do..."
Chris
What do you think a "declining reputation" means?
Does it mean?
a) The slow death penalty is real and something Google applies algorithmically? I saw it on a site last year after reading about it for a long time and thinking it was hallucinatory. I would say the removal of a sites pages in a periodic fashion (in this case monthly) would be the sort of punishment google could hand out algorithmically due to a "declining reputation"
b) Buying text links causes a "declining reputation"? As I recall, we had Matt Cutts saying that there was a structure where your 1st offense got you 90 days, the second got you 120 and so on...as I recall Cutts llater refined this to mean that there was a penalty that got worse with repeat offenses, but there was no set time structure for the offenses. The point being though that here is another example of a penalty that could be construed as resulting from a 'declining reputation.'
Here's the kicker though. Does anyone out there dispute the fact that page-jacking only affects spammers? I don't have enough evidence to do so, and the specific examples brought to the GoogleGuy on /. were knocked down by him as not actually suffering a page-jacking, just minterpreting the SERPs.
This is the most interesting SEO day I've seen in quite a while.
Does anyone out there dispute the fact that page-jacking only affects spammers?
I would dispute it.
Spammers might be quicker to notice than other webmasters, but it could happen to anyone.
Have I been highjacked by my own PPC listings or am I reading the search results wrong?
On the other hand, it appears many people here only have themselves to blame for Google not understanding they have a horrible problem (the root is the stupid idea that urls are "pages") because more examples were not sent in. If only 30 examples were submitted, then why should they really believe the problem is widespread?
The site whose redirect caused the problem was on a .cz domain. The hijacking site indeed seemed to be of the mass doorway/marketroid type, but my page which was displaced absolutely was not.
[added] I DID submit my situation to Google when it occurred. They ignored me.
[edited by: buckworks at 12:01 am (utc) on Mar. 24, 2005]
Or is everything being snarfled, of the mass doorway/anonymous-dropship/affiliate-lead-gatherer promotional/advertising/marketroid form?
Those sites and others are doing the snarfling of all kinds of sites.
In fact some sites are selfdestructing themselves.
This is more of a poisoning than true hijacking but it can be used to lower the target sites position in the serps for a particular search and depending on several other things cause real problems.
But what do I know?
hutcheson: you have mail
[edited by: theBear at 12:04 am (utc) on Mar. 24, 2005]
Of course I can find legitimate sites effected by this problem. I own them.
If I am a spammer, I must be the stupidest one of all time. Imagine a spammer who spends hours every day creating unique content, who accurately reflects that content in the page titles (gasp!) and who never bought a link in his life.
I am desperately waiting for G to zap the 302s, scraper sites full of my content and yes, that pesky porno site with my domain name in the snippet.
Think of it this way -- if only spammers got hijacked, why would they post 700 desperate pleas to G to stop spammer tactics like 302s backed up with metarefresh=0 tags and the horrid tangle of scaper sites? It just doesn't make any sense at all...
Lets forget the hijacker issue for a minut, but how would they explain the Changes the last 6-12 month, like where also the hijacking realy took off:
Other domains in a site:mydomain.com search(whats that? we have never seen that before, explain that.)
Alot of supplemental results pages(whats that?)
ofcause there is alot of other troubles they have, which all has started last yere, but thats a another topic.
I must say Im a little pist now that google call our sites spam and just reply as nothing is wrong.
If they have asked all the forums for a frontpage placement where webmaster could report googlejacking they would get 1000 of emails and not all webmaster read forums.
Wazzup with that?
Someone in the Slashdot thread pointed to "Drudge Report" - i have observed it myself with "BBC News", "TIME Europe Magazine" - those kind of sites (pretty hard to discover with "site:" command on mega-sites, you have to dig on an article level). Don't know if they're spammers, haven't got email from any of them, ever ;)
Added: I even found a WebmasterWorld thread that had been hijacked once.
[edited by: claus at 12:34 am (utc) on Mar. 24, 2005]
I haven't had any spam from them either.
If there are two pages URLa and URLb, Google would cache, index, and rank both of them. If one provided a normal link to the other then it would "pass" some PR too. Both could appear in SERPs.
If URLa provided a 301 redirect to URLb then I would assume that just the URL for URLa would be stored internally in Google, and marked as being a redirect. I also assume that URLa would be dropped from the SERPs for the period that it returned that status, and that URLa would be respidered occasionally to see what its status was. The content residing at URLb would be spidered and indexed and would appear in the SERPs with the URL for URLb against it. If at any time URLa went 404 then it would be dropped from the index, likewise URLb.
If URLa did a 302 redirect to URLb, then this is a temporary redirect. URLa is saying that the content temporarily resides at URLb. There is no reason to include URLa in the search results though. Google could quite easily include URLb in the results with its associated content being cached and indexed. However, Google could also keep an internal note that it had been redirected from URLa, and if the status of URLb ever changed from 200 to 404 then Google would know to go back to URLa and ask it for the new location of the information. That is, Google "remembers" URLa as being the starting point for the 302 redirect but does NOT show URLa in the SERPs as there never was any content AT that location.
Does this make sense? What flaws would there be in that?
