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]
May I make a suggestion?
Some of this is a bit off topic but it needs to be said.
What I see taking place is google sits back and does not come out publicly on topics that are important.
Topics such as how PR is passed or this 302 issue.
When you do this these issues take on a life of their own and the darnedest things start happening.
The passing of PR issue for instance. SEO's claim that direct links will pass PR where 302 links will not. I think Google should clear this up.
I think you have done a good job by adding that piece on being careful with SEO's since there are many bad ones out there.
But you need to go one step more in my opinion.
Clear up the issues of a redirect to www for a website and how it will effect the ranking.
Clear up the issue of a direct link verses a non direct link.
Does having a text entry have the same effect as a link?
Such as "http://mydomain.com" verses <a href="target url
I think the PR ranking number is over rated but many believe it's very important - so much so we are now seeing offers for links on high PR rated sites for over $100 a month.
So since Google is the source of this ranking then it should state what it's relevance is!
And most important put out something on this topic of a 302 issue.
Google is number one and as such the pressure on Google is much higher than any other SE.
I believe you need to come up with some way to communicate important things such as these topics else you will find a crisis will take place that will become a mess.
By not clearing up these issues you allow those undesirable SEO's and others to claim things which are not true.
That in turn fuels even more problems by those following bad advice.
I am seeing the WEB becoming more and more a jungle.
And the major search engines are part of the problem rather than being a solution to it.
How many website which are targeting Google Adsense will it take before you start to clamp down on it for instance? If this is not addressed we will see a search engine war soon and that will have far greater effects on website owners than this fever of a 302 problem.
In my viewpoint google is allowing this spam by not eliminating these targeted websites from being adsense partners.
And it is nothing more than Spam when a site is designed with only one thing in mind - targeting adsense keywords!
And if I was Yahoo or MSN I would be thinking of blacklisting all websites that contain Adsense.
If that happens then where are we?
Vin
I know that this might change already tomorrow or tonight and my pages positions on the serps might decline again. But for now I shall forget the Rotating Algos and enjoy "RESELLERīs DAY" :-)
Have any of you who have been affected by allegra noticed something similar today?
Along with the lumping together of non-www and www even when you specifically stated only one of them; try these:
- Removal is quoted as 90 days in some places and 6 months in others;
- After removal, Google sends an email to webmaster@removed-site.com (as well as to the email address you used to sign in to the URL console itself) saying what has been done. In the email to the webmaster it says:
"From : "Google URL Console" <ur1-remove@goog1e,com>
The following urls/messages have been removed. Please contact goog1ebot@goog1e,com if you do not approve:
yoursite.com/ NOINDEX"
If you reply to that message, to the address that they indicated to use, then you get this in response:
"Thank you for writing to Google. We'd like to assist you, but we only respond to messages submitted through our online contact form. Please
visit [google.com...] to submit your message, and we'll get back to you soon. We apologize for any inconvenience, and we look forward to hearing from you."
GoogleGuy mentioned:
NOTE: Do not submit your own site to our url removal tool in attempt to force a canonical url. I repeat, do not submit your own site to our url removal tool. Using the url removal tool was some idea that a WebmasterWorld member came up with and started talking about.
What I think is that this is a result of an unwanted combination of circumstances, and posts in different threads about different subjects. In several 302 threads, the use of the URL removal tool was discussed to remove hijacks. Because 302 hijacking has not been a big issue for me I haven't followed these threads intensive, so I wasn't fully aware of the discussions taking place there and the important role of the url removal tool to solve the hijacking issue.
At almost the same time I have posted in the supporters forum about a specific www vs. non-www problem of a fellow member--and the possible duplicate content problem involved. In this thread I have mentioned the use of the url removal tool to clean up supplemental results. My intention there was to use the tool as intended, i.e. remove old and obsolete entries from the Google index. In the past I have used the removal tool to remove obsolete urls from deleted pages that were supplemental for quite some time with success. That was the scope of how I wrote that sentence, but may not have been the scope how others have read it.
I didn't mentions tricks like temporary adding "noindex" meta tags to remove just one of the versions, because I wasn't aware that people would combine the advice in the hijack threads together with mine about another subject to try to remove one of two current versions of their website. As most of us, I also didn't know that for the url removal tool the www and non-www urls are identical.
That evening I sent a private e-mail to the fellow member with the www non-www problem that it might be best to first wait until the effect of the 301 was visible before using the removal tool and went to bed to forget the whole issue.
Now that I have seen GG's specific warning not to use the URL removal tool on the own site to remove canonical url problems, I am affraid that some people have combined my advice, in combination with the trick in the hijack threads as a last resort to try to get back in the SERPs again. With disasterous results. The hijack removal trick, used on your own domain in an effort to resolve a www vs. non-www issue, in combination with the Google interpretation that www.domain.com is identical to domain.com has sent websites on a six month journey to Neverland.
If anyone was triggered by my post in the supporters forum about using the url removal tool, and started to experiment with it to remove one of two versions of their site or homepage, I would like to apologize. It was not my intention, and if I would have had the slightest idea that a specific use of the removal tool could harm sites in such a way as is now known, I would certainly have made that clear in my post, or not have posted that advice at all.
You wrote your post in good faith trying to help, and your post should be taken as such.
My friend.. its not your fault that some fellow members ended in removing their own site in a mistake.
Luckily GG might be able to help them and this part of the general problem is solved.
[edited by: reseller at 11:01 pm (utc) on April 21, 2005]
Besides using the allinurl command, I have noticed with several different sites I have checked GoogleRanking for keyword ranking for a particular site that another site will sometimes come up instead of the one that I had input in the tool. This might be a bug in their tool because it gives out the wrong site. However, this site that is listed always has some kind of redirect to the site in question. I've seen the page caputred in frames with a php redirect, the title of the site in their site, the name of the site used multiple times on the page stealing rank, and other means to steal your content./rank. You might want to check this out for those sites that are ailing.
You wrote your post in good faith trying to help, and your post should be taken as such.
Agreed.
can someone tell me what canonicalization stands for, sorry to be so dumb
canonical URL is the actual URL of the page. any pages linking to it or redirecting to it are non-canonical.
canonical - where the page actually lives.
canonicalization - would mean 'looking at a mess of redirects and figuring out where the actual content lives.'
canonical link - a full address ht*p://w*w.site.com/page.htm
that is a canonical address - the actual address.
example of a non-canonical url would be a relative url such as ../page.htm which is an address relative to the page the link is on.
I think googleguy is using the term 'canonicalization' in the sense of deciding where the content resides in a re-direct situation. (from a search engine perspective) or where the site resides or which site gets credit for the content.
A few days ago I also sent a message via the 'Removing information from Googles search results' option on the Google contact page explaining what I had done and asking when the www version of the pages would reappear.
I am glad to say that this has resulted in some success as my www home page has been reinstated. (The non-www version is also back with it's cache from May 04.) My status page in the url console now shows 'request denied' against the domain.com entry having shown 'completed' for the last 20 days.
To lammert, and any others, I would like to point that I was not prompted to do what I did by anything anybody else might have said. I have used the console before but I was ignorant of the www non-www connection.
Losing the home page in Google is inconvenient but I don't remember having had any traffic from Google to any of the pages that were removed, whether www or non-www, since December anyway.
I only posted here (first time) because I was concerned that there might be a perception that only WebmasterWorld regulars had suffered thru their use of the url console.
So I am relieved to see that my request thru the published contact process has been acted upon.
