Forum Moderators: phranque
First, "hijacked" might not even be the right term. I discovered my website title and content appearing in Google, but pointing to a totally different URL. Viewing the cache in Google shows my content. Using a browser to go to the URL causes a redirect or refresh to occur so my home page is displayed complete with my URL in the address window. But if I use a script to perform the request, it returns my homepage content directly (no redirect or meta-refresh). So I suspect that this is what Google gets when they index the page. Is that what "hijacking" a site means?
The hijacking URL points to a php script that ends with a number. So I am guessing that I'm not the only victim. I changed the number a few times on the URL to see if they were ripping off other sites. Bingo. And some large ones at that. They are all data intensive or reference sites with many thousands of pages. My site fits this profile too.
My inclination is to contact the owners of some of the other sites and see if they have any ideas or resources to pursue the culprits. I don't have money to deal with it. My brother is a lawyer with some experience in copyright law, so I can probably get him to at least fire off a credible cease & desist letter, and perhaps contact the hosting company and registrar.
The domain name appears to be registered with phony names. At least the Admin and Billing contacts. There are some other aspects to it that lead me to believe that this person or persons is not new to this type of theft.
My website traffic has declined slightly over the last two months when it should have seen a large seasonal jump. I suspect this hijacking is partly to blame for it, but it would be pretty hard to prove.
So my questions are: Should I just contact Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc., and then ban their IP and leave it at that? Will it be worth the effort to pursue legal action? Does anyone have any other tips and advice?
(I did a search for threads on "hijacked website" and didn't find this covered directly. If I missed some prev. topics, please point me to them)
I would delete the entire initial post, but hopefully it will help someone else from jumping to the wrong conclusion.
cheers! (I'm going to sleep now)
I wouldn't let the offending site off _quite_ that easily however.
If I have this right, a link of the form
www.scrapers.com/site=1234 (or /n=123 and variants)
..is a way of gaining credit for YOUR content for the sake of THEIR rankings / SERPs position.
You noted other numbered sites/pages. Do you think these were all 'accidents'?
Some feel there is reason to believe that Google (at least) is wise to this,
and is passing on 'PR' to the rightful originating sites or pages.
I sincerely hope they are right, but would like some confirmation.
Best - Larry
Don't... there are several threads here about this. More often than not IMHO this vulnerability is being openly exploited now. The problem lies in the indexing of every piece of dynamic content to be had... most of which being content that doesn't even exist until called. It adds indexable content to the linking site and uses only others work and bandwidth. Take a big enough pipe... and someone could double the big SE's 8 billion pages by linking dymanically to the rest of their index. Buy enough inbound links from some high PR sites and they would take it all in. I don't see the value in indexing a placeholder link to a legitimate site to begin with. Of course nobody has made me the Internet czar either. ;)
Someone probably will feel like a dolt before this is all done. It likely won't be you.
