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]
How to id a 302?
It will appear with your title, your snippet, your page in the cache, someone elses URL. It may appear in a site:yoursite or may be filtered from you seeing it.
Try allinurl:yoursite any listings with
YOUR TITLE
your snippet a cache of your page
someone elses URL
is a threat.
Upon further investigation it may be a page with a META refresh pointing at your site or it may be a script. It could be a page containing an amazon type snapshot of your page with a 302 redirect on the same page pointing at you.
These types of listings will poison a site's PR and slowly drag it into googles abyss.
What do I do if I find a 302 like this?
1. put a META tag on the page that is the target of the 302 link.
META name="googlebot" content="noindex,nofollow"
2. Submit the URL of the hijackers 302 link (that is pointing at the page you just added the META tag to) into google's URL removal tool. (nuke it)
3. Remove the META tag from the target page so that it can be crawled again.
ALL these steps are critical. Do it exactly as described.
This is NOT the answer for every website having trouble with google ranking. This is the answer for websites who HAVE a 302 hijack situation.
header("Location: [mysite.com...]
which returns a 302. This worked fine for many years. Now I've fallen from #1 to nowhere to be seen.
I've changed my redirects to:
header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently");
header("Location: [mysite.com...]
which now returns a 301. Hopefully problem solved.
Any ideas on how long before (if ever..) I regain my position in the SERP's?
He told us to report spam penalties caused by the 302 redirecting at: [google.com...] , and to include "Reinclusion Request" in the subject line.
How will I know if a Spam Penalty has been removed or not? When I contacted Google using the above method, I just got an automated email response back that explained how to determine whether a site is currently included in the index.
[edited by: engine at 8:38 am (utc) on May 4, 2005]
[edit reason] formatting [/edit]
I have many inbound links with tracking paramaters that I use to track ads/links/partners. I get the paramater, plant a cookie and then redirect to the home page. I was using (PHP) for the redirect:
header("Location: [mysite.com...]
How have these links shown up in the SERP's?
The problem with 302 was that when someone linked to you (using certain criteria) then google would attribute the redirect as a page and assign that page the PR of the target. Even the SERP placement of the target too I suspect.
When did your site go down?
They did a 'fix' (we think) about 2 weeks ago. So if the 'fix' did it you may want to ponder that a bit. Because that's when 301's started 'acting strange', see the various 301 threads on WW.
In fact, the hijacker knows people go to the site, so now they have even made a full sales page out of this page! Of course the cache is different, hasn't moved since September. The new sales page is defintely about 2 weeks old.
I also see my rankings in allinanchor are doing really well, but of course my rankings have dropped out of site.
Still super frustrated without answers.
It seemed to happen near the end of march.
I did'nt realize that 301's might also pose a problem.
Be very careful though.
If you use
disallow: / in your robots.txt
and submit your robots.txt URL the removal tool will remove your entire site for 6 months, it's a knife on steroids.
Just remember - submit the hijackers URL into the tool after you cause that url to return a 404 (by making the target return a 404)
speda1 - end of March - that would be about the time google started tweaking things?
Since then it's hard to say exactly what a 301 or 302 will do in google - (it's top secret)
the 302's were stealing PR from the target (before the tweak) not sure what they do now.
You should read through some of those 301 threads
These began to occur shortly after the 'tweak'
[webmasterworld.com...]
[webmasterworld.com...]
All white hat site too, now nearly 11 months old. Yahoo loves the site and the funny thing is I use Adsense. I now get about 8 times more referrals from ASK than Google even though ASK has less pages in their index(450) versus Google (830).
