Possible Hijacking

site dropped in rankings badly

[personone]

Hi,
Please excuse the ignorance but I am absolutely new to all of this. We have a problem with our site. According to a friend of mine they reckon our sites homepage has been hijacked. This is the story :

We have found a page on the net which has totally copied our homepage verbatim, it then instantly redirects to another page from the same copying site. We can see our content by clicking on the Cached link of this page then stopping the page fully loading in our browser and so stop it redirecting. We then click on the "cached text" only link and we can see a complete copy of our homepage.
This page ranks higher than our own original page, in fact our own original page is no longer found in the index.

My questions are this :

1. Is this called Hijacking?
2. What can I do about it, i.e. is there a Google email address to send to or an abuse type of form to fill out.
3. I've heard that I can remove the hijacking page by using the "page removal tool" but I've heard so many bad things about doing this.

Hopefully somebody can give me some good advise as we are really struggling now.

Many Thanks.

[personone]

I also heard that creating a Google Sitemap may help in a situation like this.

[Lorel]

Before you report a site to Google or elsewhere check the thief site out thoroughy. See if they have your site listed somewhere and then run a server header check on it. If it's a 301 redirect copy off the code and add it to your report. Check to see if they do this to other websites and if so report that also.

Also check the code on the page where they have the link to your site and see if they are breaking other rules, hidden text, alt tag spam, etc. Also before reporting them to Google Adsense read their rules carefully as there may be something you're not aware of that is forbidden.

The more info you can gather the more likely Google will take action.

HOWEVER, Google does not consider a hijacking their problem. They may take action against the site for breaking their rules but you will have to contact the host yourself and tell them what you found. Don't waste your time contacting the site owner-- a thief already knows their hands are dirty.

Contact Google spam report here:
[google.com...]

Contact Yahoo Spam here:
[add.yahoo.com...]

If they use AdSense on their site go here:

[google.com...]

Here is Yahoo's abuse email:
[add.yahoo.com...]

If the thief has hidden or falsified contact data on their WhoIs and there is no host contact data (they may be hosting their own site) then they are hiding or falsifying their data for illegal purposes and you can do something about it. There is an org that controls the registration of domains (the name escapes me at the moment) and if the thief site has hidden their contact data then you can complain to that org and they might intervene on your behalf.

For more info search for stop 302 redirect

[edited by: Lorel at 2:08 am (utc) on July 14, 2006]