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]
The quality of Google responses is abysmal. I have several friends who, upon having written to Google about a particular topic have received complete nonsense as replies. Not once, but a dozen times in the last 6 weeks or so.
As a test we set up four people to ask exactly the same question via their support form. The questions were word for word identical except for the URL in question. The four answers received (summarised here), ranged from "definately not", and "no", to "yes", and "absolutely yes".
I kid you not.
If a site owner had removed all the hijackers and 302, with the removetool or other way, why is it that the site dont reapeare or googlebot comes back.
Back in December 2004 I lost all my ranking and in a drastic attempt to address dup. content penalty I tried to get rid of all the pages indexed under wrong domain name (without www) using the infamous URL console. As I soon learned the URL console treats both domains w/ and w/o www as being the same. I can’t think of any reasoning used by google’s engineers in deciding to remove pages from both domains when in fact only one is submitted and all associations between the two (meaning 301 or 302 redirects) are non-existent. I wonder if there is something special about www prefix or the tool always removes pages from the root domain as a “feature”. If the letter is true then one would be able to remove some serious players who allow hosting under their root domain like dyndns. org for example.
Anyways, it is been more then 90 days and of cause my site is still out. GoogleGuy, I'll gladly give you my last name, forum handle, SSN and even my mother’s maiden name just to get my site re-enabled. Heck, I will even stop replacing google search with MSN as a home page on all the computers I can get my hands on :)
I’ve been sending re-inclusion requests every few weeks without any success. GG, many of us would greatly appreciate if you could post the exact steps/procedure to submit "accidentally" removed sites for re-inclusion
Is it okay to use redirects for statistics purposes when the redirect link goes through your cgi-bin AND you block all robots from links to your cgi-bin in your robots.txt file?
I got your sticky yday. About 80% of my pages were spidered between from the 22nd to 23rd. This is the first time anything other than index page has been accessed in at least 2 months. BUT, none of those pages are indexed with anything other than url. I would have thought those data would have been update to title/desc listings within 24 hours of the crawl.
Not sure what is up. But at this point I guess I am sorta giving up hope.
C
:(
