People are using 302 to redirect on my site

site hijacking

[tabish]

hello all,

I ahve recently noticed that few of the sites are using 302 to redirect to my site and day by day my search engine rating is getting down.

How do i complain google that they are redirecting to my site and that ip does not belong to my site?

Regards

[lammert]

do the 302 URLs show up, when you do a site:yourdomain.com search in Google? If not, there is probably no 302 hijacking in place and you have to search for an other reason for declining positions in the SERPs. Not every URL which redirects with a 302 to your site causes harm. Many sites use it for tracking and counting, not for hijacking.

[alphacooler]

I thought those that used 302's for tracking/counting were a source of hijackings as well. What differentiates a 302 link from being harmful and non? I was under the impression they were all harmful.

[lammert]

Not all 302 redirects are harmful. Actually Google has made two attempts recently to get rid of the problem alltogether. The basic problem with 302 hijacking is, that when Google crawls a URL and a 302 redirect to that URL, it ends up with two URLs with identical page content. To prevent duplicate content in the SERPs, the algo has to decide which URL is the most important one. Sometimes the Google algo picks the wrong one which causes the original URL to disappear from the SERPs. Because the algorithm determined that both URLs are actualy pointing to the same page, attributes like PR are moved from the original URL to the 302 one.

Transferring attributes from one URL to another is not a bug within the Google algorithm, but in general a desirable feature. There are uncountable examples where a page is accessible from more URLs:

• example.com/ vs. example.com/index.html
• example.com vs. www.example.com
• example.com/directory vs. example.com/directory/

Most 302 redirects are not harmful. They first of all bring you traffic, and as long as the Google algo decides for your URL in favor of the redirecting, it shouldn't have a negative effect on your rankings.

More info on this issue in the thread [webmasterworld.com...]

[stinkfoot]

example.com/ vs. example.com/index.html
example.com vs. www.example.com
example.com/directory vs. example.com/directory/

Having had 2 of the 3 being crawled and in google for the last 3 months and having seerps for major keywords go from number 1 for 4 years to 80+ the last 3 months I would contest it doesnt have any effect on your serps.

The bot is going mad spidering /dirname and then /dirname/ one url after another.

Any one with any ideas how to stop the bot doing this would be a great help

[stinkfoot]

hmmm as a quick addition www.mysite.co.uk.co.uk is now in the allinurl:www.mysite.co.uk search ... wierd stuff

[lammert]

The bot is going mad spidering /dirname and then /dirname/ one url after another.
Any one with any ideas how to stop the bot doing this would be a great help.

Temporarily switching the discussion from 302 redirects to 301 for this purpose: The 301 redirect from the version without a / to the one with a / is the best solution. Many hosts have this configured by default. If you are using Apache server and have access to your .htaccess file, you could add the code:

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI}!/$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI}!\.
RewriteRule ^(.*) http://www.example.com/$1/ [R=301,L]

This rewrites every URL which is not ending in / and withhout a '.' to the version with slash.