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]
I know what the problem is since I too had a mishap which lead to the same problem.
Care to share?
GoogleGuy: Note that for inurl: and allinurl: searches, results from other sites are perfectly valid. So if you own yoursite.com and do a search allinurl:www.yoursite.com, it's a completely valid result to get a url from www.someothersite.com/resources?url=www.yoursite.com, for example. That's how inurl: and allinurl: are supposed to work--they match all docs with the requested terms in the url, not just docs on www.yoursite.com. That doesn't imply any problem/hijacking/issue; just that someone else had your domain name in their url.
when i do an allinurl:mydomain.com i'm still getting another site (302 redirecting) that shows as theirdomain.com/links.php3?op=visit&lid=24
my domain is nowhere in the URL ...
is there an email i can send this to?
thanks
When I do either of these searches, allinurl:mysite.com or inurl:mysite.com, I get only 4 results. I am uncertain what this means. I have hundreds of pages. All the internal links on my site include my domain name. When I do site:mysite.com, I get hundreds of pages. ALL my links include my domain name.
Out of these 4 links, 2 are from my site, one is a link from a directory that has my domain name in the URL, and the last does not have any reference to my domain name at all.
I have about 125 incoming links, all have my domain name in them. Should I not be seeing these?
Can someone please tell me if I should be seeing more then this?
And no, I do not use www in any of my links and all incoming links do not use it either.
Unfortunately, it appears that some people mis-read the procedure and submitted www.theirsite.com to the Google Removal console. I believe I recall (?) that some people here questioned what they were doing, but...
Or using meta tags to tell the urlconsole bot to take it down. This is what we tested and it worked fine. The March 23rd update is when we seen stuff starting to disappear and many many others did to. Bad 302 redirects went supplemental and so did ours.
With our site, there seems to be some canonical issues and there are signs that our PR sitewide has dropped like a rock but it's hard to for me to know what is going on exactly since I can't exactly see it through Gbot's eyes.
I hope they respond.
vin
I used the tool and managed to remove a bunch of 302s. I thought I was helping myself out by removing duplication and taking some of the pleasure away from those who created the malicious 302s to start with. As I said, I was impatient and should have just waited this thing out. The removal tool worked fine for me, but the caveats about forgetting to change the metatag back, or inadvertantly submitting the canonincal page were made explicitly.
I know I was one of the members asked to explain the use and wanted to apologize publicly if anything I said caused others problems.
I am not aware of any members speaking about submitting the ACTUAL/intended url/site for removal as Googlguy mentioned a few pages back. This would obviously not be a good thing.
Nobody have told any, that they should remove //domain or www.domain
I did a mistake in the robots txt, I fogot a single User-agent: googlebot
Disallow: /
so now my site is totaly out of the serps, but it makes no differece in visits, but when was it MSN is going to release the new OS, then we maybe dont need google anymore.
