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]
An extra entry in robots.txt enabling/disabling 302's to/from external sites would take care of this...
<META NAME="robots" CONTENT="noredir">
1.) This would allow webmasters to be able to deal with redirections due to the ignorance or abuse of other webmasters.
2.) Redirection 302 would still be accepted as such by search engines when authorized by the webmaster of the target page.
3.) The tricks with a temporay "noindex, nofollow" is quite interesting, but it is obviously too tricky to be a real long term solution. The worst side of it is that it creates a lot of unproductive work for the victim.
An advantage of this NOREDIR is that it could work with all search engines. Not only Google suffers from the 302 redirection.
With the recent introduction of NOFOLLOW, the search engines proved they were able to create new attributes to make their work better. Why not a NOREDIR? It would give a competitive advantage to the search engines supporting it.
Jean-Luc
But, when i hit the Cache button, it shows the following:
"Your search - cache:ehkm_NZ0P5kJ:shop.store.yahoo.com/widgets/ - did not match any documents"
Anyone know what this means?
Why isn't there a cache of my site?
Then store.com/widgets/ will be out of the results for some time. (A Supporters thread suggests 90 days.)
my site is missing from Google since using the Google Removal Tool. However, I see it is showing once in a while on a certain data center. (yes, I did remove the "NOINDEX" metatag immediately).
1 Was it there before you used the removal tool?
2 What did you remove?
I'm so happy.
It was out for about a week. My main index page had been hijacked by one of my affiliates. It totally replaced my index page in Google. I used the google removal tool to remove the offending site. Also, found about 9 other offending sites at the same time and removed them also. They all cached back to my index page, so removal was simple. But, after removal, my index page still wasn't back. I wrote to every email address I could possibly find at Google and asked for reinclusion. I'm not sure if it just naturally took a week to come back on it's own, or if the emails I wrote did the trick.
Regardless, I'm going to go celebrate!
302 should be a link. - I agree but as it stands right now some types of cross-domain 302's are a temporary location of your home page.
Plz giude me what can I do.. I am specifying below, what i am doing to cope up with this problem..
1.Sending request to Google automatic URL removal system to remove those URLs whose:
a.Links are showing supplemental result.
b.Links are directing to some other site.
c.Links are not showing any title & description.
2.Modifying our content in all the sites, so that Google find some fresh content and may crawl our site.
3.Modifying images size of the pages in order to change the size of the page, again to invite google to crawl our site.
4Implementing Day/Time function in our site, so that it updates regularly.
5.Adding DTD statement in all the pages of the websites.
6.Placing absolute internal linking on your web site internal pages (i.e. including full domain name in links that are pointing from one page of your site to another page on your site).
7.Creating a 404 error page for our sites.
Should I do these changes?
What else can I do to get back my rankings?
[edited by: ciml at 9:56 am (utc) on Mar. 29, 2005]
[edit reason] Examplified [/edit]
Has anybody removed a redirect URL from somebody elses site and seen it come back (yet)?
Window - first step do site:www.yoursite
Any URL's in there which are not yours should be removed. Usually they will have your page as a cache (an old copy). They will also have your title and description but a different URL. Get rid of those.
1. Place a
<META name="googlebot" content="noindex, nofollow">If googlebot doesn't come around much it may be a good idea to modify your home page at least. Make sure your server has a 'last modified' feature enabled (not always possible). If your site was getting crawled ok before it is likely because of those foreign links doing 302 to your home page. Googlebot is going to the other sites to find your home page and is getting lost.
I have seen 2 or 3 people had this same problem and google came back munching away and the SERP's came back about a week after removing those URL's.
