How to report a 302 page hijack

Instructions on how to deal with 302 hijacks

[Whitey]

Just over a year ago Matt Cutts provided instructions on dealing with 302 page hijacks

[mattcutts.com...]

What do you do if you suspect a “302 hijacking” but don’t have my email address? There’s a convenient way that should get your report to the same engineering list, where it will get the same level of investigation. Go to [google.com...] and click “I’m a webmaster inquiring about my website” then select “Why my site disappeared from the search results or dropped in ranking” and click continue. In the webform that you get to, make sure you put “canonicalpage” in the Subject line, then put the details in the Message body. Someone will route that message to an engineering mailing list where we dissect claims of canonicalization problems (that is, picking the wrong url).

This form doesn't seem to handle this request any longer. Does anyone know the new way to inform Google of 302 hijacks?

[walkman]

Whitey,
I believe that we get hijacked because our sites have been hit by google first. We are no where to be found not because someone linked to us via 302, but because our trust /rank is so low that any page will outrank us.

[Lorel]

Before reporting 302s check to make sure they are search engine friendly or not. some 302s are for tracking purposes only.

[Whitey]

Lorel - that's a good point - the one that we question holds a cache of the page. Wouldn't that be dangerous?

[edited by: Whitey at 9:13 pm (utc) on Nov. 8, 2006]

[mcskoufis]

I've had the same problem (and still do on some sites).

Hundreds of domains and thousands of subdomains / subfolders were sending 302s to my sites. Took me a while to understand what was going on and I can say that Google Search had been affected by those spammers.

I submitted an spam report using the site you mention, then did more research (as after 2 months those domains were still in Google's index). I found out that in most of the cases the spammers were hostings many domains (all very similar) on a single IP address.

Also the other trick they do is host a domain on IP A and a subdomain of this domain on IP B. This way it is impossible to check how many websites (domains + subdomains) using reverse-ip checking.

Did a more detailed spam report and also on the site: and link: queries I submitted the "dissatisfied with results" link.

Also I did contact their support team via email (it was the only time a human replied from Google), he thanked me for pointing it out, but could not say if action would be taken or not.

Also I did several spam reports after grouping the domains which were identical.

4 months after my initial report the sites were kicked out of Google's index.

They must have been badly hurt, as now all their domains use 200s... Things radically changed. From my experience the whole network was leading back to an auction site where those domains were being sold...

Feel sorry for the new owner who thought he won the lottery with a nice domain...