Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Many unethical webmasters and site owners are already creating thousands of TEMPLATED (ready to go) SKYSCRAPER sites fed by affiliate companies immense databases. These companies that have your website info within their databases feed your page snippets, without your permission, to vast numbers of the skyscraper sites. A carefully adjusted variant php based redirection script that causes a 302 redirect to your site, and included in the script an affiliate click checker, goes to work. What is very sneaky is the randomly generated meta refresh page that can only be detected via the use of a good header interrogation tool.
Googlebot and MSMBOT follow these php scripts to either an internal sub-domain containing the 302 redirect or serverside and “BANG” down goes your site if it has a pagerank below the offending site. Your index page is crippled because googlebot and msnbot now consider your home page at best a supplemental page of the offending site. The offending sites URL that contains your URL is indexed as belonging to the offending site. The offending site knows that google does not reveal all links pointing to your site, takes a couple of months to update, and thus an INURL:YOURSITE.COM will not be of much help to trace for a long time. Note that these scripts apply your URL mostly stripped or without the WWW. Making detection harder. This also causes googlebot to generate another URL listing for your site that can be seen as duplicate content. A 301 redirect resolves at least the short URL problem so aleviating google from deciding which of the two URL's of your site to index higher, more often the higher linked pagerank.
Your only hope is that your pagerank is higher than the offending site. This alone is no guarantee because the offending site would have targeted many higher pagerank sites within its system on the off chance that it strips at least one of the targets. This is further applied by hundreds of other hidden 301 permanent redirects to pagerank 7 or above sites, again in the hope of stripping a high pagerank site. This would then empower their scripts to highjack more efficiently. Sadly supposedly ethical big name affiliates are involved in this scam, they know it is going on and google adwords is probably the main target of revenue. Though I am sure only google do not approve of their adsense program to be used in such manner.
Many such offending sites have no e-mail contact and hidden WHOIS and no telephone number. Even if you were to contact them, you will find in most cases that the owner or webmaster cannot remove your links at their site because the feeds are by affiliate databases.
There is no point in contacting GOOGLE or MSN because this problem has been around for at least 9 months, only now it is escalating at an alarming rate. All pagerank sites of 5 or below are susceptible, if your site is 3 or 4 then be very alarmed. A skyscraper site only need create child page linking to get pagerank 4 or 5 without the need to strip other sites.
Caution, trying to exclude via robots text will not help because these scripts are nearly able to convert daily.
Trying to remove a link through google that looks like
new.searc**verywhere.co.uk/goto.php?path=yoursite.com%2F will result in your entire website being removed from google’s index for an indefinite period time, at least 90 days and you cannot get re-indexed within this timeline.
I am working on an automated 302 REBOUND SCRIPT to trace and counteract an offending site. This script will spider and detect all pages including sub-domains within an offending site and blast all of its pages, including dynamic pages with a 302 or 301 redirect. Hopefully it will detect the feeding database and blast it with as many 302 redirects as it contains URLS. So in essence a programme in perpetual motion creating millions of 302 redirects so long as it stays on. As every page is a unique URL, the script will hopefully continue to create and bombard a site that generates dynamically generated pages that possesses php, asp, cigi redirecting scripts. A SKYSCRAPER site that is fed can have its server totally occupied by a single efficient spider that continually requests pages in split seconds continually throughout the day and week.
If the repeatedly spidered site is depleted of its bandwidth, it may then be possible to remove it via googles URL removal tool. You only need a few seconds of 404 or a 403 regarding the offending site for google’s url console to detect what it needs. Either the site or the damaging link.
I hope I have been informative and to help anybody that has a hijacked site who’s natural revenue has been unfairly treated. Also note that your site may never gain its rank even after the removal of the offending links. Talking to offending site owners often result in their denial that they are causing problems and say that they are only counting outbound clicks. And they seam reluctant to remove your links....Yeah, pull the other one.
[edited by: Brett_Tabke at 9:49 pm (utc) on Mar. 16, 2005]
someone posted this 302 thing on Slashdot
[slashdot.org...]
I hope the link is OK
great news. I'm sure G is enjoying the PR.
> useful imo if your site is suffering
Useful for a webmaster who wants even greater confusion, IMO.
A symptom of this situation is as follows:
1: a site:yourdomain.com in google returns pages that are not your pages that is the green url listing at the bottom of each listing isn't one of yours.
and/or
2: your site has been split into a combination of:
www, non-www, IP addy, and/or parked domain forms.
The script being used can of course present Google with one thing and you with another based on UA and/or ip addy.
I would have to concur that. Rereading the Sept. 2004 post also helped me alot.
Boredguru, your suggestion is very plausible and my *only* concern with it is to be found by G to be serving them alternate content *if* they come around with a stealth bot. That is why I am leaning toward giving them their own site altogether in a subdomain or an even an alternate domain. I don't want to tarnish the main domain site in any way and I believe G would see the subdomain as separate as a totally unique domain site. Alternatively, I also have a couple seasoned alternate domains to play with here as well. I really plan on implementing something along these lines and would appreciate feedback as to why one way would be better than another. I am still weighing the factors myself.
kilonox, many sites have sessions in URLs. Some do use redirects to help assign those sessions, and a it is not uncommon for such a site to suffer from crawling and link-assignment problems.> useful imo if your site is suffering
Useful for a webmaster who wants even greater confusion, IMO.
I don't think many people have the luxury of waiting on Google to fix it ciml if they are suffering. If they don't know how to code or manage code, something like this will make the do whatever it takes to try possible solutions. If it comes at the expense of a short term serp hit cause of dynamic urls, if it works, then its a good thing.
I know you understand what it means to be in a mc situation where time and money are flowing into the drain and you are forced to try every route to get to a solution --
One site of mine did not have a 301 redirect and the index's pagerank went to 0 (white bar). Before the site was hijacked the pagerank was five after the 302 redirects were removed the pagerank finally came back. When it came back it was a two. It has been a two for six months now. Also the site has never ranked as well in the serps as it did before the hijacking.
It looks like a 301 redirect will protect your Google pagerank and stop the hijacker from stealing it until you can get the 302 redirects removed. It won't stop you from being penalized for duplicate content and loosing your rankings but I think it will prevent permanent damage.
I can't get the redirect removed this time. A seo company from Thailand owns the domain that is 302ing me. I have emailed them several times at several different email addresses. They won't reply or remove the redirect. I have also contacted the offending site's hosting company and Google. No replies.
Msn is having the same problem handling 302s. We need to get a thread like this going in the Msn forum. I hope Msn is aware of this problem.
I know Google is aware that they are allowing hijackers to get other sites penalized. They just don't care. How hard can it be to fix it? Yahoo fixed it. Google claims that that there is nothing a competitor can do to hurt your site. A flat out lie.
How about a script to target a specific 302 links pointing at your site? .htacess would be a good option for me. I'd rather just deal with them as they come.
Okay Ciml. It might look confusing, but how many big sites do you know that have url the length of your hand, and that which keep changing.
Lots of big sites do it.
And you know what a year and half back i remember laughing at some medium to big news site that had placed in their terms and condition, that linking to their site without the written authorization from them was not allowed. That is if i want to link to them from my site, i need to get a written authorisation from them and verification of my page with the link. I thought what fools they were. Guess they are pretty safe now from all this.
And if anyone wants to sell an hijacked domain that is not that close to them, i am willing to buy.
Serious, anyone has an offer?
and please dont rip me off. I dont have that kind of money!
[edited by: boredguru at 7:11 pm (utc) on Mar. 15, 2005]
One of my sites has been hijacked to the point that I get absolutely no organic search engine traffic whatsoever from Google. I was planning to re-design the site anyway, going from static Pages to dynamically generated PHP pages. Once Google spidered my site's pages, wouldn't I be getting my way back into the serps anyway? Google still spiders my site now, so my thought is that fresh pages with new URL's would partially solve the problem for me right now.
If it is even allowed, what would happen if you put a 301 to yourself and lets say you add current time, date and maybe a quote of the day to your homepage.
Evertime googlebot comes across your page it will see that it has been permanently moved. Would this cause google to recheck your page against the offending hijackers page at the very least?
One of my sites has been hijacked to the point that I get absolutely no organic search engine traffic whatsoever from Google. I was planning to re-design the site anyway, going from static Pages to dynamically generated PHP pages. Once Google spidered my site's pages, wouldn't I be getting my way back into the serps anyway? Google still spiders my site now, so my thought is that fresh pages with new URL's would partially solve the problem for me right now.
I have been having dyanamic php urls from the time the site was built and i dont have a problem in ranking well. But the only problem is that you wont be able to see your PR. Does not mean you dont have one, but just that you wont be able to see it in the toolbar.
And do something on the double. If G still visits your site, you do have the power what to feed her when she comes.
It would be called a redirect loop.
In the words of homer simpson, doh! (wasn't thinking)
How about this,
Make your site reference like this, ht*p://example.com/site/
i.e.
Homepage ht*p://example.com/site/
Search ht*p://example.com/site/search.html
content ht*p://example.com/site/content.html
If a person comes to your website under that normal ht*p://example.com/ then use a RewriteCond to 301 them to ht*p://example.com/site/
Is it possible to use a few RewriteCond and the [OR] and! to create this?
Have no idea if this is possible, but i'll throw it out there.
