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]
I do wonder why it took so long though? This is not to be nasty, all credit to them for even bothering to say they had recognised the problem and have made changes.
I will make some guesses, i'd love to know what has actually happened.
- 302's were so deep rooted that they couldn't just make the change due to unpredictable results that might occur. It just a long time to fix.
- "Bigger fish to fry". The problem was not considered that serious.
- The problem mainly effected sites with a 'minor penalty' of some sort so whats the problem anyway.
- Warm fuzzy factor is wearing off so they had to fix it. Negative publicity.
- They didn't know what people were talking about.
- Increased workload, so many people email complaining, they had to look at it even though they didn't think it was particularly interesting. Compounded by more support issues due to people excluding their sites.
- It was spreading with unpleasant results and becoming serious.
Without wishing to speak too soon:- Well done to those that kept the pressure up and sought to help, perhaps you had no choice?
Thanks for the reply - I will send a re-inclusion request.
But just to let you know that this has happened to thousands of sites on the web so hopefully a fix will be put in place for all the guys and gals who dont read WebmasterWorld. (I am sure that it is already known at the plex now though)
Hoping for the best :)
That isn't what people here were doing. What they were doing was taking down their own page at www.myownsite.com so that it served a 404 error. Then they submitted www.badsite.com/302/redirect.to?url=www.myownsite.com to be removed. Google removed the bad URL from the index without touching the "real site" at all. The page on the real site was then reinstated before a random GoogleBot appeared and saw the 404 on the real site.
Can you confirm that that method is OK?
Thank so much for your infomation. Looks like I am in the same boat as a lot of others in thinking the url removal tool was the way to beat the 302 hijackings. I did this in Feb and a few in March.
Can you tell me what I should do at this point?
I did see in our logs today (the 20th) that the url console came by twice today (not at my request) it went to one of the subdirectories twice the first one it received a 301 and the second time it got a 200. I am not sure what that all means. Any insight or help on your part would be appreciated.
I guess i should mention that it has always been a 200, and this is not a page that was submitted to google through the url removal too.
That isn't what people here were doing. What they were doing was taking down their own page at www.myownsite.com so that it served a 404 error. Then they submitted www.badsite.com/302/redirect.to?url=www.myownsite.com to be removed. Google removed the bad URL from the index without touching the "real site" at all. The page on the real site was then reinstated before a random GoogleBot appeared and saw the 404 on the real site.
Yeah. Some of us were able to remove a few of the 302s because they redirected to the canonical page (and the owner had control of the robots metatag=noindex required for the removal). But this is very dangerous if you aren't careful. Submitting any version of the canonical page (www.mysite.com or mysite.com) will cause the canonical to be removed. In retrospect, it probably did little good to remove those 302s that way as Google was working on this problem behind the scenes and we were impatient (human nature).
GG thanks for your comments/support this week.
C
[edited by: crobb305 at 11:43 am (utc) on April 20, 2005]
I can deal with 90 days but I may be writing from debtor's prison come this summer. Now I'm considering buying another domain name and putting a new homepage there - I'd likely be in the serps again in a week. But this seems like a drastic step for something that has to be simple on Google's side.
On March 22nd my homepage did reappear for a few hours with a March 22 cache date (so I know it is possible).
Sorry for yelling but this is getting to me.
Cant they just re-crawl the homepages/domains looking for 301s from non-www and accidentilly removed homepages - making sure the canonical url is indexed correctly?
Or is a full re-crawl required.
:::: Sigh ::::
I too might have thought a little harder if I had known it was 6 months. Let's hope it is 90 days for us and not the 6 months.
302 redirects
Dup Content generated by Google
Coverups & mis-directs
Special treatment for certain WW members
Constantly changing (hidden) policies & (hidden) procedures
Piled higher and deeper customer support
All for fear of potential reprisals. Well, I guess I just shot my chances of getting re-included.
This site was always white hat, always clean. I suspect that a spam penalty kicked in because of advertising through GoClick and the fact the site made it into Dmoz in about 4 weeks after birth. (Lots of links quickly).
I have already submited to "canonicalpage" suggested by GG about two months ago. No help. According to the Google directory, my PR has been increasing, not decreasing. I don't get it. Do I send a reinclusion request? Do I just wait it out?
It's weird to see my RSS feeds picked up by other sites sitting at the top on my name search.
[edited by: BillyS at 1:29 pm (utc) on April 20, 2005]
Special treatment for certain WW members
&
All for fear of potential reprisals. Well, I guess I just shot my chances of getting re-included.
Exactly why I am pushing for the problem to be fixed for all rather than covered up or fixed with re-inclusion requests.
The Google engineers are tinkering/applying a fix, this all takes time, and we can only be patient.
Patience of course does not pay bills or wages.
I know the adage "never rely on free search engine traffic to build your business" is a good one and we must do everything in our power to use other forms of marketing, but the plain fact is that 80% of internet traffic is generated by free Google search results and if we are honest, many of us are reliant on Google to drive a good proportion of new visitors to our sites. When you are thrown a googly like the Allegra update, it is difficult to be fully prepared for the devastation that follows.
In my ideal world, if I managed Google search, I would recognise that the current Google SERPs are flawed. I would roll back to the pre Allegra index. Learn from the algo change that I had implemented and start again. Somehow, I don't thnk my pipe dream will come true.
<Do I send a reinclusion request? Do I just wait it out?>
GG has suggested to submit a reinclusion request, so what are you waiting for :-)
Note that for inurl: and allinurl: searches, results from other sites are perfectly valid. So if you own yoursite.com and do a search allinurl:www.yoursite.com, it's a completely valid result to get a url from www.someothersite.com/resources?url=www.yoursite.com, for example. That's how inurl: and allinurl: are supposed to work--they match all docs with the requested terms in the url, not just docs on www.yoursite.com. That doesn't imply any problem/hijacking/issue; just that someone else had your domain name in their url.
when i do an allinurl:mydomain.com i'm still getting another site (302 redirecting) that shows as theirdomain.com/links.php3?op=visit&lid=24
my domain is nowhere in the URL ...
is there an email i can send this to?
thanks
I for one took his advice.
I don't think this is due to a 302 problem.
I know what the problem is since I too had a mishap which lead to the same problem.
I fixed the mistake and traffic resumed less than 30 days later.
Vin
I know what the problem is since I too had a mishap which lead to the same problem.
Care to share?
GoogleGuy: Note that for inurl: and allinurl: searches, results from other sites are perfectly valid. So if you own yoursite.com and do a search allinurl:www.yoursite.com, it's a completely valid result to get a url from www.someothersite.com/resources?url=www.yoursite.com, for example. That's how inurl: and allinurl: are supposed to work--they match all docs with the requested terms in the url, not just docs on www.yoursite.com. That doesn't imply any problem/hijacking/issue; just that someone else had your domain name in their url.
when i do an allinurl:mydomain.com i'm still getting another site (302 redirecting) that shows as theirdomain.com/links.php3?op=visit&lid=24
my domain is nowhere in the URL ...
is there an email i can send this to?
thanks
When I do either of these searches, allinurl:mysite.com or inurl:mysite.com, I get only 4 results. I am uncertain what this means. I have hundreds of pages. All the internal links on my site include my domain name. When I do site:mysite.com, I get hundreds of pages. ALL my links include my domain name.
Out of these 4 links, 2 are from my site, one is a link from a directory that has my domain name in the URL, and the last does not have any reference to my domain name at all.
I have about 125 incoming links, all have my domain name in them. Should I not be seeing these?
Can someone please tell me if I should be seeing more then this?
And no, I do not use www in any of my links and all incoming links do not use it either.
Unfortunately, it appears that some people mis-read the procedure and submitted www.theirsite.com to the Google Removal console. I believe I recall (?) that some people here questioned what they were doing, but...
Or using meta tags to tell the urlconsole bot to take it down. This is what we tested and it worked fine. The March 23rd update is when we seen stuff starting to disappear and many many others did to. Bad 302 redirects went supplemental and so did ours.
With our site, there seems to be some canonical issues and there are signs that our PR sitewide has dropped like a rock but it's hard to for me to know what is going on exactly since I can't exactly see it through Gbot's eyes.
I hope they respond.
vin
I used the tool and managed to remove a bunch of 302s. I thought I was helping myself out by removing duplication and taking some of the pleasure away from those who created the malicious 302s to start with. As I said, I was impatient and should have just waited this thing out. The removal tool worked fine for me, but the caveats about forgetting to change the metatag back, or inadvertantly submitting the canonincal page were made explicitly.
I know I was one of the members asked to explain the use and wanted to apologize publicly if anything I said caused others problems.
I am not aware of any members speaking about submitting the ACTUAL/intended url/site for removal as Googlguy mentioned a few pages back. This would obviously not be a good thing.
Nobody have told any, that they should remove //domain or www.domain
I did a mistake in the robots txt, I fogot a single User-agent: googlebot
Disallow: /
so now my site is totaly out of the serps, but it makes no differece in visits, but when was it MSN is going to release the new OS, then we maybe dont need google anymore.
