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]
For what is is worth and if it helps I will tell my experience.
I believe that Google has made a change to target Spam. I am not 100% sure but am 80% sure this change took place around January.
I also think they made mistakes with this change.
In my case an image file which was used as a background set in a CSS file was set wrong.
I sometimes use copy paste and it can get you into trouble if you don't remember to make the changes needed.
In this case the image was being read from another website I run and Google it seems flagged it as spam.
I forgot to alter the URL after pasting it.
It took me a few weeks to find this mistake.
It's not easy to locate some mistake you made that you may have done 2 months ago.
So under the new system you can't have a background image that is located on another website else it will trigger off a penalty and your PR goes out the window.
I don't know what other items Google is looking at as Spam but I am sure others are getting hit the same as I was.
I really can't see how a background image would ever be considered spam but it seems Google does consider it so.
Vin
Its _possible_ G is simply penalizing hot-linkers.
Do you have some good evidence this might be the case?
Could it be some other problem? I'd like know this if true. -Larry
I am liking that if they are going to penalise scrapers and hotlinkers.
Bring it on.
To stay on the safe side, and since we _don't_ know, I suggest:
NO 302 redirects unless they start and end within the same website / domain.
NO hot linked images, not even between two sites owned by the same person.
Straight outgoing html links (href=realsite) only.
Find another way to do 'statistics' (chuckle) - Larry
Then the last week of January I notice a drop in traffic from Google. This drop was very big.
Traffic was off 80% from a norm that I have seen from google.
Of course I was looking everywhere for a solution - even at a possibility of a 302 hijack.
Starting looking at my Templates and other pages to see if something there triggered it off.
I finally noticed a large number of hits from my UK Website to my USA website for an image.
Then I found the CSS file was pointing to the wrong website for the image.
The entry in the UK site caused the problem in the USA site.
Now that I think of it this os not a good thing for google to be doing.
They should exclude images from their checking!
There is no way this can be considered spam!
When I made the change it worked so one would not see any problems right off - the image displayed as it should have. What I didn't know was it was reading the image from my USA website.
Now the tag for that image is in a template so that made it worse since the template was used for over 1,000 pages.
After I corrected the CSS file the traffic resumed only a few weeks later.
An image set in a CSS file does not show up if you do view page source so with that in mind the only explanation is google now reads the content of the CSS file. That has to be true since it's the only way to know that I had it set wrong.
I suspect that they are taking it a step further in that if you have a CSS tag and no CSS file or a CSS file that does not have this class name then this too may wind up as a penalty.
This may have come about due to a SEO that has misused the class tag which should have had a valid CSS entry but did not.
It was instead used as a method to trick the SE's into giving a high link count by having a list of URL's following the class= tag.
The number of websites with the spam entry was in the many thousands and growing.
If you notice Google has placed the SEO warning on their Site not long ago and I think they made the change at that same time.
I had to think about posting this for a long while.
Still not sure if I should have let this cat out of the bag.
I suggest you refer this to the google guy since this may well be a big problem if not corrected.
Vin
Will those of us requesting "Re-inclusion Request" at the web form you specified earlier in this thread receive any confirmation that our sites will or will not have the 302 spam penalty removed and thus be re-included back into the index again?
Those of us that have completed the Re-inclusion Request are simply sent the automated response that states that our sites are in the Google supplemental index.
Thanks
From what I see it seems to be limited to the use of background images.
Having an plain image tag does not seem to be a problem.
Also not sure if it's a problem if the code in used within the HTML of the page.
Vin
what about affilliats? they use offsite images for tracking and for the ads.
One thing I found worked well for me (and MAY help those who accidentally deleted their index.)
Make sure your robots.txt file is FLAWLESS this is critical. It's ok to exclude directories and stuff but NOTE: whatever is disallowed will be removed.
Submit your robots.txt file to the removal tool (in the place that asks for your robots.txt URL.)
I did that and it found a few things in the directory I didn't even know existed and removed them.
The reason I say it MAY help is because you are telling it what IS NOT disallowed. It may just pick up your index page again. Also you are giving it a snapshot of your site. I would try it if I was in that situation.
