Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Sometimes, an HTTP status 302 redirect or an HTML META refresh causes Google to replace the redirect's destination URL with the redirect URL. The word "hijack" is commonly used to describe this problem, but redirects and refreshes are often implemented for click counting, and in some cases lead to a webmaster "hijacking" his or her own URLs.
Normally in these cases, a search for cache:[destination URL] in Google shows "This is G o o g l e's cache of [redirect URL]" and oftentimes site:[destination domain] lists the redirect URL as one of the pages in the domain.
Also link:[redirect URL] will show links to the destination URL, but this can happen for reasons other than "hijacking".
Searching Google for the destination URL will show the title and description from the destination URL, but the title will normally link to the redirect URL.
There has been much discussion on the topic, as can be seen from the links below.
How to Remove Hijacker Page Using Google Removal Tool [webmasterworld.com]
Google's response to 302 Hijacking [webmasterworld.com]
302 Redirects continues to be an issue [webmasterworld.com]
Hijackers & 302 Redirects [webmasterworld.com]
Solutions to 302 Hijacking [webmasterworld.com]
302 Redirects to/from Alexa? [webmasterworld.com]
The Redirect Problem - What Have You Tried? [webmasterworld.com]
I've been hijacked, what to do now? [webmasterworld.com]
The meta refresh bug and the URL removal tool [webmasterworld.com]
Dealing with hijacked sites [webmasterworld.com]
Are these two "bugs" related? [webmasterworld.com]
site:www.example.com Brings Up Other Domains [webmasterworld.com]
Incorrect URLs and Mirror URLs [webmasterworld.com]
302's - Page Jacking Revisited [webmasterworld.com]
Dupe content checker - 302's - Page Jacking - Meta Refreshes [webmasterworld.com]
Can site with a meta refresh hurt our ranking? [webmasterworld.com]
Google's response to: Redirected URL [webmasterworld.com]
Is there a new filter? [webmasterworld.com]
What about those redirects, copies and mirrors? [webmasterworld.com]
PR 7 - 0 and Address Nightmare [webmasterworld.com]
Meta Refresh leads to ... Replacement of the target URL! [webmasterworld.com]
302 redirects showing ultimate domain [webmasterworld.com]
Strange result in allinurl [webmasterworld.com]
Domain name mixup [webmasterworld.com]
Using redirects [webmasterworld.com]
redesigns, redirects, & google -- oh my [webmasterworld.com]
Not sure but I think it is Page Jacking [webmasterworld.com]
Duplicate content - a google bug? [webmasterworld.com]
How to nuke your opposition on Google? [webmasterworld.com] (January 2002 - when Google's treatment of redirects and META refreshes were worse than they are now)
Hijacked website [webmasterworld.com]
Serious help needed: Is there a rewrite solution to 302 hijackings? [webmasterworld.com]
How do you stop meta refresh hijackers? [webmasterworld.com]
Page hijacking: Beta can't handle simple redirects [webmasterworld.com] (MSN)
302 Hijacking solution [webmasterworld.com] (Supporters' Forum)
Location: versus hijacking [webmasterworld.com] (Supporters' Forum)
A way to end PageJacking? [webmasterworld.com] (Supporters' Forum)
Just got google-jacked [webmasterworld.com] (Supporters' Forum)
Our company Lisiting is being redirected [webmasterworld.com]
This thread is for further discussion of problems due to Google's 'canonicalisation' of URLs, when faced with HTTP redirects and HTML META refreshes. Note that each new idea for Google or webmasters to solve or help with this problem should be posted once to the Google 302 Redirect Ideas [webmasterworld.com] thread.
<Extra links added from the excellent post by Claus [webmasterworld.com]. Extra link added thanks to crobb305.>
[edited by: ciml at 11:45 am (utc) on Mar. 28, 2005]
At the same time site:dmoz.org says that there are 11 million results. The real site only has 600 000 categories, and 600 000 Category Charters, and a few thousand informational pages. That makes only 1.2 million real pages. However, yesterday you couldn't get beyond 953 results. Today you can't get past 584 results.
Glad to hear of it also.
We have seen plenty of 302 redirects and most have been taken care of. One in particular has hijacked more than 1000 pages at the most we have seen. Since the recent updates the bulk of thes results have went supplemental and at the same time they did ours did.
Our site has been removed from theirs for quite some time actually before these updates (the old 302 redirects are now just redirect to another site). We noticed that a bunch of those old 302 pages have come back with very old cache dates. When this happened many of our pages at the same time have reverted back to and old 301 redirected URL's with caches of our newest design but back from last year(supplemental) and what hasn't reverted have lost title/description (except for recently crawled pages). If any of these old 301 pages would be considered dupe content we are in a world of hurt.(They shouldn't show caches of our new design since that URL has never seen it). It just seems like this thing need to just be crawled out but since all of this we haven't see our normal 4000-5000 requests from googlebot. Just requests for the same few pages almost everyday.
It is all that new math that confuses you, it gets to me as well. I'm finding my graph theory and finite combinitorics, matrix algebra, number theory, advanced calculus and other textbooks are of no help.
Laplace transforms just go poof and numerical methods just give unspecified syntactical errors (funny the subroutines no longer compile)..
Must be canonical math.
I'll have to see if I can find a primer that won't confuse a simple woodland critter. But I'm also rather long o the tooth so I'll probably never figure it out even with a primer.
Claus,
I hope that all of the babies that got tossed with the dirty bath water get saved, however I wouldn't hold my breath you might get quite blue.
Yes, my site came out of the problem and is doing better than ever. Just hope it doesn't happen again.
I did learn a lot from experiencing it though. I had let my site go stale until this got my attention.
You took action, a lot of folks haven't. Some are still scratching their heads and trying to figure out what happened.
The clock just got started and what GG told crobb305 in msg# 116 of this thread doesn't really bode all that well for sites that haven't taken any action.
I'm glad to hear that your actions have resulted in a positive traffic change for your site.
Kirby/Emmett, I'd love to hear details about the sites you mention. If you could submit the sites in question to google.com/support with canonicalpage in the title and include "Kirby" or "Emmett" so that I can recognize it, I'd like to ask someone to check those two cases out.
E-mail sent. I had only canonicalpage in the title and put my name in the top of the message. Hope it gets through.
Kind of hard to describe a website issue in under 1000 characters though :)
GG told crobb305 in msg# 116 of this thread doesn't really bode all that well for sites that haven't taken any action.
Yeah I have been working on this since it (the hijacking) started last May. I have been posting about it since then, deleting unrelated urls with the removal tool, emailing Google, etc. Apparently "declining PageRank" made my site vulnerable to the tracker2s that hijacked my url last fall. When I searched site:mysite those tracker2s were showing as if they were part of my site; my homepage was indexed (searching www.mysite.com) as one of the 302s. Yes, my PR went to zero in Sept but came back to 7 in Dec.
All the 302s are gone, and so still are my rankings. Still waiting to see what happens.
C
Anyway, the most interesting question to me is: Are sites starting to return? Has anyone seen their sites come back already?
Claus,
I had a 302 redirect problem that knocked my site way, way down in the google serps on Dec 15 and traffic went down even more at the beginning of Feb. I got the site that was using 302 directs to remove them around the beginning of March - in addition to removing some copyrighted content from my site.
My google traffic (which had dropped about 95% by then) started coming back around 3/29. Just a trickle at first. By 4/9, I was seeing a substantial increase. Now my google traffic has come back to about 40% of what it was before this problem. I'm very pleased to see my site coming back :) and I'm hoping for a full recovery.
Marval, if someone is doing 302s to your site, you might be able to find redirecters by looking in your server logs for unusual referrers
Can you tell us how specificaly to identify a 302 hijack?
There are lots of valid unharmful 302's.
We were id'ing them by the ones appearing in site:
Is there a chance that hijacking urls' could still be present but not appearing in site:?
Assuming that site:mysite shows all url's directly associated with mysite - are these 'extra' url's being filtered from the results or are they no longer associated with mysite:?
Could you elaborate on this a little for us?
