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]
GG thanks very much for the very helpful posts.
We've implemented many 301s but still use 302 redirection to count some of our outbound clicks - is this a mistake? Are most people in this thread using any 302s at all anymore? Just static links?
Still I am looking for an answer of some sort on the 301 issues I also see. Like many others here we have a 301 redirect fix for www and trailing slash in url's. This has been in place for many years. I see both intermixed in each of the results when doing site:www.widgets.com and site:www.widgets.com. This used to show correctly. Right before we took a dive we noticed that we had 2 index pages one with and one without www showing up with tite description and design being the same even though the one without the www shouldn't be showing anything except url because of the 301. I have tried doing this kind of search on other sites that have this 301 in place and their results are 1 set with www and 1 set without (with www is url only and without www having full title and description the way it supposed to be and how we used to show). It kinda goes with our old deep content 301 redirect urls having new content in serps. I dragged through 5 months of log files and ALWAYS these pages returned a 301 to googlebot.
GoogleGuy
On March 9th I sent an email to webmaster@google.com with the subject "canonicalpage hijackers", was it received and reviewed?
I outlined what I consider to be an extremely serious problem regarding 302s and Google manipulation.
Here in Italy I have identified a group of people who have registered hundreds of domains (and probably more like thousands but I haven't got the time to track them all down) that are all "pseudo search engines" which all use the same basic template based on 302 redirects similar to the way Overture works.
These "search engines" have replaced about 2o of my smaller clients in SERPs by stealing their content.
Even exact phrases with quotation remarks (I mean long phrases that belong ONLY to a client's web page) yield results for these templates while excluding the real web site in spite of the fact that the real page IS indexed in Google.
In many cases they have gone to lengths to hide the 150 character long redirect by placing a mouseover command which gives the appearance of the link being to the real site when it fact it is not (onmouseover="javascript:window.status='http://www.realsite.com'").
Shall I resend this email detailing more precisely who these people are and how they do so?
What we have here is a deliberate attempt to exploit the 302 bug in Google and distribute the "technique" as quickly as possible in order to profit from all the hard work of webmasters at the expense of honest site owners.
I too removed mysite.com during the 1st week of Feb to recover from duplicate content issue. Removal tool said '90 Days'. Now I hear it is six months?
I've tried the reinclusion request but it hasn't worked.
Sure wish I could get mysite.com back in the serps. The 90 days is soon to expire.
Our site dropped in Page Rank because of a spam penalty which allowed the hijacker pages to become the canonical pages for our site?
That is why when we remove the 302 redirects with the removal tool it doesn't affect our rankings because the cause was a spam penalty.
In my case, My bandwidth for the month was all used up and my host blocked all visitors to my site and put one of their pages in the place of all my pages which caused a duplicate penalty because every page was the same and was getting a 200 OK error.
So that was the cause of my penalty. Just got to ask for reinclusion now?
<I too removed mysite.com during the 1st week of Feb to recover from duplicate content issue. Removal tool said '90 Days'. Now I hear it is six months?>
msja
<Sailor, it's six months. I know it sucks waiting, but for me at least I know I've tried everything else so there is no regret.>
I wish that GG has posted this message already in february 2005 to avoid such sad situations which honest decent publishers as sailor and msja are brought in:
< NOTE: Do not submit your own site to our url removal tool in attempt to force a canonical url. I repeat, do not submit your own site to our url removal tool. Using the url removal tool was some idea that a WebmasterWorld member came up with and started talking about. I just talked with user support about a reinclusion request, and using the url removal tool on your own site will *not* help. All it will do is remove your site for six months.
The user support person asked me to emphasize not to remove your site with the url removal tool; it won't do what you are trying to do.>
If I remember right we also did a few old pages that we removed from our site in February. Kindly rebounded in March, when we did the 5 hijacked URL's, up until the dreaded 23rd update.
Never run it on the main URL and top level directories or even sub directories just 5 deep content pages and a few deep content pages that were removed from our site.
Still I don't believe this could have caused all of this for us especially when one option says...ahem..."Remove a single page using meta tags". Heck who knows.
GG has posted recently very critical and valuable info which 100s of publishers, who have been subject to 302 redirect issue, might benefit of.
May I suggest to compile all GG feedback in this thread in one document (only read) and post it in a fixed place on top of all threads of forum 30 for a month or two.
Reason is that I don't expect all publishers to read each post of every thread and maybe several visiting publishers haven't realized yet what hit their sites and how to handle it.
Thanks and wish you a great sunny day.
