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]
With the latest update these pages with the original cache were showing up in site:mysite.
I just commented out the .htaccess lines regarding these pages and nuked them with the removal tool.
Waiting to see what happens with fingers crossed.
Upon reflecting I think if I could do it over I would put a disallow in robots.txt for these URL's and submit the robots.txt instead.
I'm still worried this could bother Google since the index reflects a lot of dupes.
g1 sounds good except that we've got so many redirects (tens of thousands at server level) that I'd be worried the spider would see that ocean of new links as spammy.
I think we'll sit tight and hope the 301s shake out in the coming update.
So this time I inserted a disallow in robots.txt for these non-existant files and submitted robots.txt - see what happens. I left the .htaccess 301's in place this time since the robots.txt will disallow googlebot from requesting them in the first place.
crossed fingers again.
It seems to me that apart from trying to remove a URL from another site, the robots.txt method is the best way to go with this removal tool.
Whatever is disallowed in robots.txt will be removed from the index - even if it does not exist.
It even found a few images related to these files that no longer exist and included them in the removal request.
After filing all the DMCA stuff, writing all the long letters explaining exactly what these SEOs are knowingly doing the only thing I've seen is that site bouce around in nowhere land, without titles and descriptions, or buried under pages of of crap. So a friend told me to come and look at this thread, and I filed my little reinclusion request, ands this moring woke up to a new listing for my site.... one that has my title and description, but again, ins't associated with my URL.
I'm just so burnt on theives, I could spit. You can't even sue them because they aren't actually breaking any copyright laws.... unfair business practices, maybe, but not worth persuing in court. As far as I can tell, Google can't seem to figure out how to properly index a 302 so I would suggest, they simply stop trying to. If someone moves their site, that's their problem. If googlebot is so smart it should find the new site on its own and index it. Period. But if they can't do it without without completely screwing up a site that has never even moved servers or IPs, I would suggest they just don't try.
4-16 759
4-19 578
4-20 1,540
4-21 1,520
4-22 1,510
4-23 1,490
4-24 1,410
The number of my non-www pages in the index, which was inflated by about 300%, has been going down except for a small blip on April 22:
4-16 15,200
4-19 14,200
4-20 13,700
4-21 13,300
4-22 13,500
4-23 13,300
4-24 12,900
It would appear that--for my site, at least--Google is crunching its data (albeit slowly) and removing obsolete or duplicate URLs from its index in response to the redirect in my .htaccess file.
ands this moring woke up to a new listing for my site.... one that has my title and description, but again, ins't associated with my URL.
Is this the only thing you get when you search site:yoursite?
Is the cache a picture of your page but with the wrong URL?
Is it an old outdated cache of your page?
If so this is classic 302 hijack and can be fixed by you.
Exactly. Why bother if it does nothing but decrease quality and frustrate webmasters anyway. Personally i've suggested many things; "treat them as a straight link", "treat cross-domain 302's differently" etc. but totally ignoring them so that they don't even count as a vote would also be fine with me.
I will welcome most things except from thinking that they are pages, as this is about the last thing they are. Imho, Google should not index stuff that is not pages.
I Have had my 301 redirect in for one site for a month or so and the crawling seems to be better than recently.
Traffic does not seem to be improving.
Looks like a slow process.
Any luck with your site traffic wise.
Any luck with your site traffic wise.
My rankings are back to normal or near-normal for most of the keyphrases that I track, but Google referrals are still way down, so it would appear that I'm still doing poorly for many "inside pages" that used to generate little traffic individually but fairly high traffic in the aggregate.
To put it another way, my Google referrals dropped about 75% on March 23. Now they're down about 70%. And my Yahoo-to-Google ratio is up to maybe 2.4:1 after being at a low of 2:1 a few weeks ago. That isn't a dramatic improvement, but at least things seem to be moving in a positive direction.
