My Counter-measure for a 302 Hijacking Problem

Recently many of my websites were targetted by 302 spammers with very severe consequences in terms of ranking in the Google SERPs. All our rankings got lost, the site: operator was getting very strange results with the homepage being the 140th result at times while at others up to 4th. Despite several spam reports, dissatisfied with results reports and emails to their search support team, the only thing that I got back from them was the usual "There is almost nothing a competitor can do to hurt your rankings" in the SERPs.

The Problem

Hundreds of thousands of unique domain names having millions of subdomains and sub-dirs, running 2 distinct scripts (no idea which) on each domain. The one was outputting a page with only 5 sponsored links which is similar to the big Adsense rectangle and the other presenting a list of sites and the other outputting a page with several links to what appears spammy sites but each time you click the same link takes you to a different domain, including mine. All linking is done internally to a very long URL which is 302 redirecting to the victim sites.

The URLs of the sites targetting me:

302domain.com/keyword1.html
keyword2.302domain.com/
302domain.com/keyword3/keyword4-keyword5-keyword6.php

All the random domains I checked from a list I got using some DNS tools to reverse lookup the IPs hosting the spammer site are indexed, apart from some long subdirectories. Some of these sites have way over 15,000 pages in Google.

My hardest hit site had a TBPR of 4 (the same as the main sub-sections) and the homepage TBPR went down to 3, while the sub-categories remained the same. All rankings of the targetted sites were lost, while the only Google hits in my logs were from very obscure keywords only. Nearly the entire site into supplemental and things not looking good at all.

The Research I Did

This includes going through noumerous threads, some with hundreds of replies [google.com...]

However, after trying to dig a solution out of all this and failing miserably I decided to walk it alone.

The Possible Solution

I decided to test my main site and a couple of my other sites and try to move it away from the "penalty spot" by 301 redirecting my homepage to a homepage.htm page. So Googlebot was getting a 302 from the spammer site and then a 301 from my index page to the homepage.htm

This change was done back in Augoust and now the site seems to be working, as the site: was fixed and the main site finally got a TBPR of 5 for my main site and its homepage.htm after the recent Google update. For some keywords the sites rank high for the first time since November.

Also, for some reason, after doing the redirect to homepage.htm the spam domains started to *gradually* dissappear from my referrals logs.

On the sites that I did not do the redirect to the homepage.htm there are over 100 such referring sites which indicates that possibly it is not an algo update that did the trick, but the 301...

[b]Interesting Facts[b]

The spammer sites do not show up into my Analytics referrals. I can only find them out through Drupal's logs (http://drupal.org).

Matt Cutts has never answered such a question, even though I posted a few times on his blog asking for clarifications.

Google recently updated its TPR and possibly updated its algos, which means that I can't be 100% positive that what I did caused my site to appear or if it was the result of an algo update.

On a couple of my sites I have not done the 301 redirection and still no changes in Google's SERPs. It seems that the problems well exist (in my humble opinion).

Any ideas from other WW members would be appreciated, especially on what you have done to fight this spreading cancer. Is there something I am missing, or what helped revive your rankings?

Thanks in advance...

My Counter-measure for a 302 Hijacking Problem

Possible solution or Google algorithm update?

mcskoufis

mcskoufis

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