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]
Your case is great news. I'll try that right away.
I can only think that Google is the only one to blame for the www and non-www merge in the url console. How could you tell it was the same to the tool and different for the search engine? Was there any indication of that?
It is sad that Google likes to keep everything secret. They don't tell you why you are banned or wether your are banned or not. Their software has bugs (302s, Url console, etc.) and we have to work hard to convince them that that is the case. They think they are too smart to make mistakes, so it has to be our problem.
We follow their guidelines and they don't really care. If our sites vanish they will always find new ones to fill our place.
But I think it's just an unfortunate outcome due to the tool being used, at least in my case, to clean up site listings when it was presumably not intended for that purpose.
More likely it was originally provided for people to quickly suppress content that they did not want shown. In which case suppressing all *.domain.com pages was probably not an issue.
Hopefully it will either be changed or at least have the page text clarified.
You are clarifying lots of queries here..Thanks
I need your help...I have tried almost everything metioned in this section. I have a site which was working very well in google till december 2004.
Suddenly all its rankings vanished and my site's pages converted into blue links (links not having title description) and some with supplemental results...Slowly pages also decreases from google database..
My site was not updated since long, so In march I did some updations on my site like content addition, implement absolute linking etc. On April 12th my site crawled and all my links (except home page) with title & descriptions were back...
But sadly on April 16th all my links again turned into blue links
Now the status is out of 40 pages showing on site:www.site.com
30 are blue links
8 links with cache date 11 & 12 April
2 links showing supplemental results
I did not get an auto reply for my site - as I have said it does have content which appears on other sites as it is a shopping review site which may have caused the problem - however the more I look around I am seeing lots of sites effected in the same way. Bluefind today (although perhaps not a good example) for example and other users I have had sticky conversations with.(which are much better examples)
Anyway may be worth a look when you get back.
Cheers
Dayo
I have a few old pages appearing in the SERP's that no longer exist. I also have 2 or 3 cgi url's that got in before I blocked my cgi-bin from robots.
Would it be a bad move to remove those URL's now?
I don't want to risk 6 months in solitary but I sure would like those pages gone.
I have a few old pages appearing in the SERP's that no longer exist. I also have 2 or 3 cgi url's that got in before I blocked my cgi-bin from robots.Would it be a bad move to remove those URL's now?
I don't want to risk 6 months in solitary but I sure would like those pages gone.
I had the same thing -- pages on two different sites that have been extinct for over 2 years on the one site and extinct pages still in the index after redesigning another. So I did the URL removal thing on them but it took a few emails back and forth with google to get it to work and they finally dumped them manually when I asked when they would disappear. No harmful effects. They are no longer appearing in the site command.
He used the URL console to remove domain.co.uk from the index. The URL does not exist. It cannot be accessed, but there it was in the index as a URL only listing.
Both the domain.co.uk and the www.domain.co.uk listings were removed. He received an automated email that was sent to webmaster@domain.co.uk that basically said "we have removed domain.co.uk from the index" and to "write back if that was a problem".
He did not want the www version to be removed. He wrote back to the specified email address, and then received an automatic response stating that the email address was no longer in use and to use the support form instead.
He filled in the support form, and next day received a standard response explaining that crawling and indexing the web was an automated process, and that there was nothing they could do, that he should check the webmaster guidelines, and thanks for using Google. This answer had nothing to do with the original question.
Sending back a complaint got a better response, but still saying that the site would be gone for 90 days (does that now confirm the timeframe against the details on their web site, which says 90 days in one part and six months in another?), and there was nothing they could do to fix that.
You had yours fixed, but another Google Bod is now saying that that can't be done. It obviously can, but not everyone at Google is working to the same plan.
[edited by: g1smd at 11:46 pm (utc) on April 22, 2005]
Actually, I would recommend that everyone here does that. I checked 10 sites and on 9 of them Google had listed URLs that were disallowed by the robots.txt of the site. I submitted the robots file for each site to the URL console, and the pages are not listed anymore!
