26 days into the month and I have found 22 hi-jacked domains....

when will this madness stop... next month i might just hit all the forums on how to do it properly !

If you can't fix it pay someone Too !

DaveN

Hi-jacked domains? Are you talking about use of redirects employing duplicate content?

I don't want to promote the activity any more than is at this time, but people are aware of it.

and yes meta refresh still can hi-jack....

DaveN

The latest one i've came across is the site of a ebay platinum power seller.
He is selling on an average of $325000 yearly there.

His site has been hijacked and guest what!!! this guy was ready to pay a maximum of 75 bucks to get his site reinstate in Google. :eek:

Apologies, DaveN - was simply trying to get a handle of the application of the term.

A lot of the "hijacks" are probably the inadvertent result of directory click-counting pages. I've been screaming about this problem since August 2003... talked to both Matt and Dan Delutz at SES San Jose about it then and have posted numerous times on WebmasterWorld about it. Anyone could see it could make innocent sites vulnerable.

It sounds like Tim Mayer has a handle on it (yes, Yahoo has had the problem too) and Yahoo has promised we'll see a fix soon. I've yet to hear a single acknowledgement from Google that there is a problem.

Yahoo's stock is publicly traded too and frankness hasn't caused them to tank. Why can't Google fess up and fix it?

This problem has been amplified with the de-emphasis of PR in ranking. There are sites ranking with a PR of 4 in competitive areas that used to need a 7 or more. Google has a new measures of what constitutes a site that should be high in the SERPs, but still chooses a 302 war for the higher PR site.

>>Tim

Latest word on it (yesterday)

It will take a few weeks to be fully implemented but much of the index will have changed already. GoLinks have you noticed any positive changes to your sites yet?

I have not seen the problem near as much in Yahoo as in google.

I have one of those directories.

I have moved heaven and earth to try to stop the using the 302's and only use 301's. But it keeps looking like wasted effort with google.

What exactly is the problem? Explain it to me like I'm a three year old.

What exactly is the problem? Explain it to me like I'm a three year old.
Sometimes, one site can harm another site by the way in which it links to it. More often than not in a purposeful manner.

Hello russell,

you can find a lot of information in this long thread in webmasterworld.com

http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum3/25638-1-10.htm

According to lots0, who I have been told is someone to take heed of, Google cannot be tricked into doing what it is designed to do, so how is this even possible?

It's simply playing on what Google is designed to do - more specifically, one of the common filters. That's why DaveN in the original post implores Google to fix this issue.

Here's probably the most succinct thread on WebmasterWorld summarizing the various redirect issues. Message #8 has a good set of "Redirect Bug" links...

What about those redirects, copies and mirrors?
http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum3/23743.htm

With reference to meta refresh redirects, here's a link to my Aug 2003 thread, with a couple of my summarizing comments...

Banner ad redirect-page indexed as mirror site by Google
Google getting overly aggressive in its indexing?
http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum3/16069.htm

We're not supposed to be responsible for who links to us, but Google's indexing like this certainly makes us vulnerable to whatever scheme any other site decides to use....

What's bothering me here, though, is that Google is taking a meta refresh redirect page (from one domain) and assigning to it the title and content of the page it redirects to. That this happens to be the result of a spidered banner ad only highlights to me that this is a bad indexing policy.

Thank you Robert, those are good references.

Does anyone here want to take a shot at why Google might be doing this if it was for a good reason (even if we don't like it) by stepping in this search engine's shoes? Perhaps we can understand this madness by doing the exercise???

So it is tricking Google into passing PR then?

lots0
I have not seen the problem near as much in Yahoo as in google.
Yahoo is dealing with it, and solutions are being implemented. Latest word on it over here

Yahoo, Redirection and Disappearing Sites (http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/showthread.php?t=3003)

I heard that Matt asked pretty heavily for examples at the WMW conference and only got one concrete example. If people want to send specifics (i.e. "site A appears to have duplicate pages from, or is doing a 301/302/whatever to site B, and Google is wrongly picking site A as canonical", with actual values for A and B), I'd be happy to hear them. Drop an email to webmaster [at] google.com with the keyword "canonicalpage" (all as one word) and I'll ask someone to collect the feedback and pass it on to an engineer. Being extra clear will help us with any feedback you send, e.g. "The correct site is somedomain.com, but if you do the query bla, you'll see that such-and-such.com shows up instead."

So it is tricking Google into passing PR then?

Not only PR Dave, but backlinks too. I made a test recently with a PR0 disposable domain. Guess what!! after next crawl it had a PR5 and same number of and same backlinks as the "victim domain".
In that case none of the domain were removed from Google's cache however.
By now i've already reversed the situation and the disposable domain has got down to PR1 and lost all the backlinks except one which it genuinely has.

Thanks strategicrankings.

GoogleGuy - Thank you.... That's an historic post... the first indication I've seen online that Google is looking at the problem.

I can't tell you how much this would have helped in the past year. From the "outside," when you're a webmaster and sending such info to Google, it's kind of like sending it into a black hole. You never know whether you've been heard.

Fortunately, I've been able to have all such links that have been affecting me removed, but I've been lucky that the links were from cooperating sites. I basically instruct clients to avoid links from any sites using redirects.

I will spread the word to some of the webmasters I know, who, in the past, have been affected by this. You might also want to make a similar post over at WebmasterWorld, maybe on a new thread inviting input on the redirect bug.

To take this thread off topic for a moment, let me suggest that it would be helpful for Google to have a bug report request page with known or rumored issues posted, with suggested keyword identifiers. Otherwise, only those who happen to stumble across your posts, sometimes buried in a thread of several hundred, will know what's happening.

Thanks again.

Thanks for the reply Googleguy, Still google seem to be having small issues in handling redirects from Jump URLs, CGI URLs, out.php and other types of redirects, ill mail a site to webmaster at google, This site has link exchanges as out.php and some of the sites listed there are replaced with this site out.php URLs,

"www.sourcesite.org/out.php?targetsite.com&soucesitelinkid=627

But I have seen google handling meta refresh better these days, Think google is fixing this problem,

GG, with all due respect,

You have known about this issue for AGES. I'm pretty sure you don't need us to show you examples to see that this is a MAJOR flaw within your system. Maybe instead of waiting around for examples you might have your engineers test it out for yourselves.

I for one find it incredulous that after months of wailing and gnashing of teeth on the boards from people getting their sites ripped off, you pop into a thread and insinuate that it can't be a widespread problem because you have only had one webmaster brave enough to let you look up their skirt.

</rant>

iamrussell
What exactly is the problem? Explain it to me like I'm a three year old.
Russell, this isn't "black hat" and it isn't hijacking, but it's very over-simplified and gives a general idea of what can happen with 302 redirection. It's just a personal journal page (so pardon the mod link LOL) - and this was a mild rant after doing a tiny bit of digging, after seeing some ladies posting to a womens group, excitedly pursuing link exchanges for "link popularity"

Worthless Links for Search Engines (http://www.marciahoo.com/archives/2004/09/26/links-without-value-for-search-engines/)

Those are mostly innocent - as you can see with the types of sites in the Google searches (the second one has over 4K pages now) and are URL only listings, but there are other cases where there are *regular* listings at the search engines, and the title and description snippet are from the sites linked to, but show the URL of the sites linking out. You can see the difference when clicking on those.

These aren't hijacks so it's a different issue, it's just for some clarification, so for someone who's never seen it, you can see that what's listed isn't correct - and know to stay away from links like that.

I for one find it incredulous that after months of wailing and gnashing of teeth on the boards from people getting their sites ripped off, you pop into a thread and insinuate that it can't be a widespread problem because you have only had one webmaster brave enough to let you look up their skirt.


I have to agree, a poor atempt at spin on your part GG, we're used to much better stuff from you :)

The only sites i've seen this done on are sites in highly competitive cats so im not sure you will find many people willing to show you examples.

Stop stalling and get it fixed would seem the best course no?

Nick

>spin
No one actually had to post or say anything at all, so maybe "professional demeanor" or "tact" or "subtlety" would be more appropriate euphemisms under the circumstances. ;)

The only sites i've seen this done on are sites in highly competitive cats so im not sure you will find many people willing to show you examples.
Well, let's be realistic about it. The people who own such sites usually won't out their own sites, and their friends don't generally, either. And if the people who have asked me to look at their sites that got hit are any indication, those folks wouldn't know where to begin looking - they don't know what hit them.

Tell you what could really get to the root of the whole problem better than a quick fix for a problem that'll just be replaced by yet another. If the companies paying out those hefty commissions to the people doing it were held responsible for the actions of their "agents" it's entirely possible that the source of the motivation could more than likely dry up.

Tell you what could really get to the root of the whole problem better than a quick fix for a problem that'll just be replaced by yet another. If the companies paying out those hefty commissions to the people doing it were held responsible for the actions of their "agents" it's entirely possible that the source of the motivation could more than likely dry up.


Well, i presume you dont mean by law right?

So much of all the problems out their would vanish almost overnight if the people responsible for manipulating G's results were targeted properly.

It cant be done (at least not the way i see it) in some situations like "search engine spamming" as G have no way of knowing who initiated those 140K blog links but in this case it would seem fairly easy and relatvively foolproof to identify someone 302'ing from their domain right?

Whack em all, watch it fizzle out in 48hrs

Isn't the 302 issue the one blamed for the disappearance of Business.com from Google a while back?

More info on the redirects issue and Business.com here: Why Business.com Was Banned (http://www.webpronews.com/insiderreports/searchinsider/wpn-49-20040908WhyBusinesscomWasBanned.html)


I heard that Matt asked pretty heavily for examples at the WMW conference and only got one concrete example
The article seems to suggest that it's well known among webmasters that Google has a problem handling 302 redirects.

It's perhaps a little scary therefore that Google seems to only know of a single example occuring within the automated processing of nearly 10 billion files?

Hmm. I just checked for the keyword "canonicalpage" and so far no one has written in yet. I'm not saying that our canonicalization choices can't be improved, but we get much much less feedback--even when we ask--than is discussed on webmaster boards. I'll check again for reports later today though.

GoogleGuy - If you've got a way of looking at old indexes, I'd be happy to re-send you the example I sent to you on 8/12/03 and to Daniel Dulitz on 8/21/03.

Also, I think readers of this thread should know that there's a parallel thread in which you further encourage reports. I'm quoting from your message #51....

Let's Test Hijacking A Google Listing
http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/showthread.php?t=3030

I'll promise that no spam-related action will be taken based on the reports. If months later, the domain comes up for review for an unrelated reason, then that's a different matter, but I'll instruct whoever collects the feedback to only use it to check out how we pick canonical pages.

did you get any e-mails regarding this GG? We're hurting badly here...


I heard that Matt asked pretty heavily for examples at the WMW conference and only got one concrete example. If people want to send specifics (i.e. "site A appears to have duplicate pages from, or is doing a 301/302/whatever to site B, and Google is wrongly picking site A as canonical", with actual values for A and B), I'd be happy to hear them. Drop an email to webmaster [at] google.com with the keyword "canonicalpage" (all as one word) and I'll ask someone to collect the feedback and pass it on to an engineer. Being extra clear will help us with any feedback you send, e.g. "The correct site is somedomain.com, but if you do the query bla, you'll see that such-and-such.com shows up instead."

did you get any e-mails regarding this GG? We're hurting badly here...

I know for a fact that google received a big pile of examples to study.

Google will never admit (in public) that there is any problem at all. If google were to admit there was a problem that they can't get a handle on, what do you think would happen to their stock price?

I do think that the googlies are working to correct this as fast as they can. It is in their interest to get this problem fixed as soon as possible.

Note: I have seen some VERY strange things in the google SERP lately. I believe that some of these "strange" things in the SERP are the results of the googlies trying to correct this problem.

I hope they're working on it. A "We're working on it" would calm everyone though.
I maybe sounding like a d-ck, but it's extremely frustrating because it's out of my hands. For the most part all the original pages are chosen correctly, the problem is that BOTH pages (the original content one and the one doing the 302 or meta) are penalized.

If they just ignored the less linked one, they'd solve 98% of this..while they worked on a more comprehensive solution. Every "dupe" page is on the supplemental, but my homepage (and because of it the entire site) is penalized heavily too. For the site linking with a 302 or meta, penalizing page /go.php?ID=4448647874778 is no biggie, penalizing a homepage is because everything is linked from there


I know for a fact that google received a big pile of examples to study.

Google will never admit (in public) that there is any problem at all. If google were to admit there was a problem that they can't get a handle on, what do you think would happen to their stock price?

I do think that the googlies are working to correct this as fast as they can. It is in their interest to get this problem fixed as soon as possible.

Note: I have seen some VERY strange things in the google SERP lately. I believe that some of these "strange" things in the SERP are the results of the googlies trying to correct this problem.

has anyone noticed any improvements?

I havent and it's becoming a joke. How about outsourcing this to Yahoo? They seem top have fixed this problem.

I guess I should have posted here but

http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/showthread.php?p=29540#post29540

I wish I had come across these postings earlier. I've spent the last 3 hours reading all of the posts about the 302 redirect problems. I'm not an SEO - I'm a site owner, and as you can see this is my first posting.

For an extremely competitive keyword phrase with 29 million results on Google my site had a #3 ranking on Google in early 2004 (to this day we are #1 on Yahoo and #2 on MSN Beta for that phrase). Then, around April, we vanished altogether from the Google SERPs. We finally figured out that Google had indexed our homepage content for another URL - one that was redirecting to our site. I did contact them and got the link removed, but we did not get our placement back. Eventually other redirecting sites sprang up. I emailed Google but got canned responses. After months of fretting about the problem and scouring the forums I finally just decided to ignore it, and hope it would eventually go away.

Until I got my Search Day email today. I must say I'm glad to see that this problem appears to be much more widespread now, because maybe they will finally address it.

As of today I see 9 other sites that Google has indexed my homepage content for (all redirecting with 302s). Maybe I don't understand enough about the nuances of their algorithm, but to me it is mind-boggling that Google would index my homepage content on some other domain, simply because the other domain told them to do so. (BTW: all of the Cached versions of those pages show the Dec 31, 1969 date...but Google doesn't have any bugs, right?).

I emailed Google today following GoogleGuy's instructions (using keyword "canonicalpage") and I will report back on any response I get from them.

If anybody has any other suggestions I'd love to hear them.

Redirect the redirects back - seems to work :)

I did a search on some unique text from a site of mine and found it on 34 scraped sites. All scraped sites with nothing else but, and ALL running AdSense. Adsense is subsiding their activities very nicely.

One was cloaked, another had the scraped titles and descriptions hidden in an iframe, several were 302 redirects including the infamous tracker2.php - the list goes on.

Yes, and we are still waiting for Google to recognise this issue and tell us when the fix is out. I don't think it's wise for them to let this battle go on for much longer ...

I hope GG isn't still claiming no one's sent in a "canonicalpage" message. I sent one three days after his last post in this thread, and got a reply from Google that they were passing it on to the engineers.

I think GG is on vacation this week but I know they got many examples. I sent a few too

I hope GG isn't still claiming no one's sent in a "canonicalpage" message. I sent one three days after his last post in this thread, and got a reply from Google that they were passing it on to the engineers.

This needs to go further than just engineering, it's a major AdSense issue that will end up creating multiple problems for others, including advertisers. When they are nothing more than scraped pages with redirected links running AdSense they need to be sent over to the AdSense people for audit and review.

I have sent two emails to Google since Dec 1 with the keyword "canonicalpage". The redirects STILL exist. And the tracker2 urls are STILL indexed. My index page is nowhere to be found, and internal pages still indexed with url only. This has been the case since the redirects first appeared in early May of 2004. I am going on 9 months with NO Google traffic after being in the index for 4 years. I am just flabbergasted that Google has not reached a solution for this problem. Absolutely amazed.

How hard is it to identify an original/intended/legitimate url (one in existence for 4 years) from a spammy redirect? Come on.

Googleguy, if you still say you have not received any examples then someone internally at Google is deleting them and not passing them along.


Chris

I agree but un-penalizing our sites first would be better and done faster.
They have all the manpower needed for that. To check all adsense sites they need to hire many more people.

This needs to go further than just engineering, it's a major AdSense issue that will end up creating multiple problems for others, including advertisers. When they are nothing more than scraped pages running AdSense they need to be sent over to the AdSense people for audit and review.

since you've been penalized for that long see this: http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/showthread.php?t=3661
Looks like we'll be penalized even after this issue is solved. Apparently dupe penalties are for a period of time and increase for the second, third etc. "violation".

I have sent two emails to Google since Dec 1 with the keyword "canonicalpage". The redirects STILL exist. And the tracker2 urls are STILL indexed. My index page is nowhere to be found, and internal pages still indexed with url only. This has been the case since the redirects first appeared in early May of 2004. I am going on 9 months with NO Google traffic after being in the index for 4 years. I am just flabbergasted that Google has not reached a solution for this problem. Absolutely amazed.

How hard is it to identify an original/intended/legitimate url (one in existence for 4 years) from a spammy redirect? Come on.

Googleguy, if you still say you have not received any examples then someone internally at Google is deleting them and not passing them along.


Chris

The dup penalties should be dropped since they were the result of malicious activities of others. We have had no control over this situation. Google should find a way of getting rid of the penalties for those who did not deserve them.

I have had as many as 20 redirect urls at one time showing up when I conducted a site:domain.com search. The urls showing when I did that search didn't belong to me. I have been helpless.

There are still about 8 showing as I have been able to get some webmasters to remove the links. The problem won't ever go away until someone at Google, who has a heart, steps in and helps us out. Come on. Please help us out. Make it go away. :)

I don't wish to steer this Thread of-topic by replying to the AdSense issue, but IMO Google will only see a problem when/if the bulk of their advertisers disable "content network".

ThouShaltSeo, I would serioulsy consider sending your URL to Fathom via PM, if not him them someone you hold in high regard. You maybe VERY suprised what 'fresh' set of informed eyes can do.

ThouShaltSeo, I would serioulsy consider sending your URL to Fathom via PM, if not him them someone you hold in high regard. You maybe VERY suprised what 'fresh' set of informed eyes can do.
Dave,
I have given my URL not to one but to two people I trust in another forum.
They couldn't find another reason for the dupe filter penalty either.

4 days later and I got this canned response from Google:

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Thank you for bringing this to our attention. We understand your concern about the inclusion and ranking of your site and have passed your note on to our engineers.

Please note that there is almost nothing a competitor can do to harm your ranking or have your site removed from our index. If you are concerned about another site linking to your site, we suggest contacting the webmaster for the site in question. Google aggregates and organizes information published on the web; we don't control the content of these pages.

Regards,
The Google Team
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Why do I not reel reassured by this response?

GoogleGuy - are you there? Is somebody actually looking into this problem? Is there at least some awareness there now about how serious and widespread this issue is?

I've gotta say, I'm really dissapointed that Google chooses to make it look like they are sweeping this under the carpet.

"do no evil" but we supplies the means for others to do evil

Is there at least some awareness there now about how serious and widespread this issue is?

I seriously doubt it. Otherwise it would've been fixed by now and any penalties because of it would've been gone. Words seriously fail me because I can't see why they haven't fixed it yet. Yahoo did so an didn't seem to have any problems. This smacks of arrogance. Maybe the multi-millionaires don't care anymore, there's nothing left to prove

What has made matters worse is that forums (this one included) have allowed the method to be posted. Now it's become common knowledge and naturally the problem is going to get a whole lot worse before it gets better.

I must say that I'm equally dissapointed in SEW for allowing this. While one can get posts deleted for links, it's no problem to post on 'how to send your competitor to the wall'. It was all done on the chance that it may precipitate a fix at the expense of some poor site owner.

I said it at the time that this is akin to leaving loaded guns laying about to precipitate a fix to gun laws.

That's a good point but in the defense of SEW and other forums: they (like most posters) didn't expect this to linger for months, especially after it was clear that Google knew.

What has made matters worse is that forums (this one included) have allowed the method to be posted. Now it's become common knowledge and naturally the problem is going to get a whole lot worse before it gets better.

I must say that I'm equally dissapointed in SEW for allowing this. While one can get posts deleted for links, it's no problem to post on 'how to send your competitor to the wall'. It was all done on the chance that it may precipitate a fix at the expense of some poor site owner.

I said it at the time that this is akin to leaving loaded guns laying about to precipitate a fix to gun laws.

True, they didn't. However, I don't think it was morally their call to make as the loaded gun wasn't/isn't pointed at their head.

I have sent two emails to Google since Dec 1 with the keyword "canonicalpage". The redirects STILL exist.

That is all you can do and... be patient.

I suspect the more evidence Google has the better they can make their algorithm to combat this. However, that cannot be done easily without affecting other things - and that resulting outcome could indeed be worse.

Hmm. I just checked for the keyword "canonicalpage" and so far no one has written in yet. I'm not saying that our canonicalization choices can't be improved, but we get much much less feedback--even when we ask--than is discussed on webmaster boards. I'll check again for reports later today though.

Check now GoogleGuy, i just sent you one

I've been hit...

Observe the following:

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=warez.com

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=www.warez.com



http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=goink.com

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=www.goink.com





Domain listing for warez.com has been hijacked. GoInk.com is redirecting their website to warez.com, and it picked up in google’s crawl, and rendered warez.com out of the listings.

Any feedback would be welcome, thanks.

this is weird and I'm not sure what Google can do if they used 301 redirect. There's no way to see if it's a legitimate domain redirect or not. I think goink.com stopped the re-direction and you should be fine once Google gets around to index the sites again. If not, a nice email to the owner and host should do. Worst case scenario, a DCMA letter to Google will do.


I've been hit...
Domain listing for warez.com has been hijacked. GoInk.com is redirecting their website to warez.com, and it picked up in google’s crawl, and rendered warez.com out of the listings.

Any feedback would be welcome, thanks.

Ucool,

Welcome to the forums.

Just so I understand, what does warezcrawler.net have to do with warez.com? Any other domains we should know about?

Chris_D

Ucool,

Welcome to the forums.

Just so I understand, what does warezcrawler.net have to do with warez.com? Any other domains we should know about?

Chris_D


We own both, and initially i guess i caused problems with having multiple domains with same data (Didnt think about it). ALthough, warez.com had PR 7 and should have always remained. Now it has PR 4, goink is still redirecting, but it appears to happen intermitently. I tried to contact them today, its owned by a hosting company. Im sure they will sort it out but being sunday i got some dumb guy who knew nothing. Problem is, its not exactly an easy problem to explain!

this is weird and I'm not sure what Google can do if they used 301 redirect. There's no way to see if it's a legitimate domain redirect or not. I think goink.com stopped the re-direction and you should be fine once Google gets around to index the sites again. If not, a nice email to the owner and host should do. Worst case scenario, a DCMA letter to Google will do.

Archive.org tells me they have been redirecting since summer 2003! Weiiiird ****, only caused a problem since last november

unless you fix this first, you can't ask Google for help or blame them for that matter. Pick a domain and 301 the other one over.


We own both, and initially i guess i caused problems with having multiple domains with same data (Didnt think about it). ALthough, warez.com had PR 7 and should have always remained. Now it has PR 4, goink is still redirecting, but it appears to happen intermitently. I tried to contact them today, its owned by a hosting company. Im sure they will sort it out but being sunday i got some dumb guy who knew nothing. Problem is, its not exactly an easy problem to explain!

Did Google fix this yet?

Just figured I'd revisit this to see if there are any updates.

I've heard nothing from them since the canned response I got on 1/18. It would be nice to at least get an acknowledgement from GoogleGuy that they are working on this and they have received our emails following his instructions (http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/showpost.php?p=25029&postcount=19). And no, the problem has not been fixed. Seems worse than ever.

Thanks for the udate.

I've been looking into this to see how bad it is, preventive research I guess.

I was trying to find example sites, or see how many are hit by it.

It's strange...
Google's allinul command seems broken
allinurl:tracker2.php
breaks after the first 10 results.
( I'm positive I have no virus on my machine. )

Has anyone tried to count how many sites are hit by thisI know there' many long posts, but are there are solid compilations of the events surrounding this?
I'm thinking of putting one together if anyone wants to send me info.

Has Google received more than a few responses to the webmaster@ on this issue?

Heres what i got from google lol:

Hi Jon,

Thank you for your note. Please be assured that we read every email we receive. We understand you've changed your URL and would like Google to display the new link. Regrettably, we can't manually change your listed address. That said, there are steps you can take to make sure your transition is smooth.

You may want to redirect individuals to your new site. If your old URLs redirect to your new site using HTTP 301 (permanent) redirects, our crawler will know to use the new URLs. Changes made in this way will take six to eight weeks to be reflected in our search results. For more information about 301 HTTP redirects, please see http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2616.txt

Google listings are based in part on our ability to find you from links on other sites. To preserve your rank, you'll want to tell others who link to you of your change of address. One way to find out who is linking to you is to try a link search (http://www.google.com/help/features.html#link).
Enter 'link:[your full URL]' into the Google search box. Please note that we don't serve link queries for all of the sites in our index, so this may not produce any results for your site. To obtain a comprehensive list of the links that point to your page, perform a Google search on your URL. On the result page displayed, select the 'Find web pages that contain the term' link, and Google will provide you with the webpages that mention your address.

If you also need to remove your old site from our search results, you can use a robots.txt file. Google follows standard web protocol in not crawling sites that have specific instructions in their robots.txt files.
For more information about this feature and the NOINDEX tag, please refer to our FAQ at http://www.google.com/webmasters/3.html#B3

Additionally, the problem you are currently experiencing with www.warez.com is likely due to a configuration error that occurred at your webhost at the time we crawled your site. If the host inadvertently shows the wrong page for a short period of time, and the Googlebot web crawler happens to visit your site during that window of time, then our automated crawler confuses the two sites.

Googlebot will periodically revisit your site. If the configuration problem is fixed, then the problem should correct itself in the next few weeks.

You can find additional information at http://www.google.com/webmasters/.
If we can assist you further, please let us know.

Regards,
The Google Team


The funny line i find is "then our automated crawler confuses the two sites.", Seems thats whats happend with warez.com + goink.com. Also another reply was that they recieved my request and are looking at resolving the issue. Not much good lol
ive also contacted the owner of goink.com to fix the problem, waiting on the respider

On the result page displayed, select the 'Find web pages that contain the term' link, and Google will provide you with the webpages that mention your address
Wow -- wrong advice from Google. Searching for your URL as a text search will find anyone who uses your URL as the anchor text, say http://www.yoursite... But if they link to you like "Cool Site" with the URL embedded in those words, that won't bring it up. Which suggest that this part:

To obtain a comprehensive list of the links that point to your page, perform a Google search on your URL.

Should be changed to:

To obtain a comprehensive list of the links that point to your page, perform a link search on one of our competitors, Yahoo, MSN or Ask Jeeves.

To obtain a comprehensive list of the links that point to your page, perform a link search on one of our competitors, Yahoo, MSN or Ask Jeeves.
Sad, but true.

Things that make me scratch my head:
Google stock up?
GOOGLE (NasdaqNM:GOOG)
Last Trade: 211.89
Trade Time: 3:43PM ET
Change: Up 5.93 (2.88%)

Sad, but true.

Things that make me scratch my head:
Google stock up?
GOOGLE (NasdaqNM:GOOG)
Last Trade: 211.89
Trade Time: 3:43PM ET
Change: Up 5.93 (2.88%)

what goes up must come down. When you go up on hype, you fall even faster. Remember Amazon' $400 target price? Google is doing OK but not good enough to to be worth $55 Billion. GoogleGuy seems like a nice guy, so I hope he sells at least half of his shares now that the stock price is high.

UCool,

Was this the response you got regarding the 302 issue?



Heres what i got from google lol:

Hi Jon,

Thank you for your note. Please be assured that we read every email we receive. We understand you've changed your URL and would like Google to display the new link. Regrettably, we can't manually change your listed address. That said, there are steps you can take to make sure your transition is smooth.

You may want to redirect individuals to your new site. If your old URLs redirect to your new site using HTTP 301 (permanent) redirects, our crawler will know to use the new URLs. Changes made in this way will take six to eight weeks to be reflected in our search results. For more information about 301 HTTP redirects, please see http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2616.txt

Google listings are based in part on our ability to find you from links on other sites. To preserve your rank, you'll want to tell others who link to you of your change of address. One way to find out who is linking to you is to try a link search (http://www.google.com/help/features.html#link).
Enter 'link:[your full URL]' into the Google search box. Please note that we don't serve link queries for all of the sites in our index, so this may not produce any results for your site. To obtain a comprehensive list of the links that point to your page, perform a Google search on your URL. On the result page displayed, select the 'Find web pages that contain the term' link, and Google will provide you with the webpages that mention your address.

If you also need to remove your old site from our search results, you can use a robots.txt file. Google follows standard web protocol in not crawling sites that have specific instructions in their robots.txt files.
For more information about this feature and the NOINDEX tag, please refer to our FAQ at http://www.google.com/webmasters/3.html#B3

Additionally, the problem you are currently experiencing with www.warez.com is likely due to a configuration error that occurred at your webhost at the time we crawled your site. If the host inadvertently shows the wrong page for a short period of time, and the Googlebot web crawler happens to visit your site during that window of time, then our automated crawler confuses the two sites.

Googlebot will periodically revisit your site. If the configuration problem is fixed, then the problem should correct itself in the next few weeks.

You can find additional information at http://www.google.com/webmasters/.
If we can assist you further, please let us know.

Regards,
The Google Team


The funny line i find is "then our automated crawler confuses the two sites.", Seems thats whats happend with warez.com + goink.com. Also another reply was that they recieved my request and are looking at resolving the issue. Not much good lol
ive also contacted the owner of goink.com to fix the problem, waiting on the respider

Until allegra I was in the top ten on over 100 keywords for my site. Now I am around 60 or so and I cannot figure it out for the life of me except when I read this thread I am thinking about wether or not providing the RSS and ticker service to other webmasters (the same one that feeds my site) will give us a dup penalty???

I guess til this update they didnt parse the xml but now they do????

Then there is another thought that goes back to the 302 issue somewhat...

If I do a allinsite command, it appears that no one else is jacking my site, but google has the main page in there several times all under the same Title etc and url all with the same cache date. If this is a real result that means that they are filtering me out for duplicate content only there is no duplicate content it’s a screwup on their end caching the page twice….. I could be wrong, just a thought though. I do know that I went from top page on 100 different keywords with no SEO tricks at all, much less black hat and now I am anywhere from 25-75 on those same keywords. Literally overnight. These are my best guesses, I hope someone with a better understanding of the SE’s can figure it out

I cant see penalizing the whole web for RSS that makes very little sense.

SportzNutz.com

Would this issue mean that affiliate programs that use 302 redirects can cause harm to the pages that they are redirecting to.

I say this because my website has recently signed up to a an affiliate program and it concerns me that we could be damaging our position in google's SERP. Using wget I can clearly see that they use a couple of 302 redirects and not 301 redirects.


Thanks for your time

Just a quick update to my original post (http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/showpost.php?p=30852&postcount=37) to sadly report that I have heard nothing from Google other than a canned response, nothing from GoogleGuy, and there has been no progress whatsoever on this issue. Google is still indexing a dozen or so copies of my homepage on various 302 redirect URLs, while my real URL is not indexed at all. Given how long this problem has gone on, how many of us have followed GoogleGuy's instructions and reported the problem in detail, and what an obvious and egregious bug this is, I am shocked that nothing has been done about it.

Given how long this problem has gone on (...) I am shocked that nothing has been done about it.

Imagine how i feel, as i've been tracking this issue and related ones from sometime in 2003, and tracing it even further back than that. I have made quite a few posts (on WebmasterWold) on this issue and made no attempt at hiding how serious this was (although i have refrained from handing out recipes). I have used pretty strong wording as well, i'd say.

You're absolutely right that nothing has been done about this. Literally for years.

Now, i do hope that the email address given in post 19 of this thread (http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/showpost.php?p=25029&postcount=19) still works, with the subject "canonicalpage" - i have sent in a few examples myself, and i continue to mention it to others whenever possible.

Of course i have heard nothing and seen no effect, but i didn't really expect that anyway and i'm not really interested in email conversation with the nice people @ Google - all i'm interested in is that they fix it.

Thanks for inviting me to this forum Claus.

It doesn't look to me like this problem is going to be solved quickly if it hasn't already been after such a long time.

Why don't we think in terms of how we can defend ourselves from unwanted redirects in the first place? What restrictions can we place on our servers to block access to spiders being redirected? Is there a referral string we can use?

My guess is that we need help from knowledgable people at Google as to how their spider behaves and implore them to work with us on this one by implementing changes to their system that allow us to exclude the spider in certain cases when we deem it necessary.

Why don't we think in terms of how we can defend ourselves from unwanted redirects in the first place? What restrictions can we place on our servers to block access to spiders being redirected? Is there a referral string we can use?

Bobby, as i've written in other threads/forums, the sad part is that there's absolutely nothing a webmaster can do. Zero, zilch, nada. The SE spiders simply don't carry the referral string with them, as: "Which one should they choose from the multiple pages that might point to any other page?"

In post #218 (http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum30/28329-8-30.htm) of this thread on WebmasterWorld i have summarized the best bids that thread has offered sofar. I'm almost sure that none of them will work once the hijack has taken place, but perhaps some of them will make it harder to do the hijack in the first place.

The problem is not created by those that use the 302 (or meta refresh/whatever), and it is not created by the "receiving webmasters" either. It is created within Google and by Google (or any other SE that does this). So, it must also be fixed by Google.

The SE spiders simply don't carry the referral string with them

Allthough I agree on your conclusions, Claus, I think it's important to point out that there have in fact been a few times in the past where search engine spider did use referral strings in the http request. I admit it hasen't been very comon but it has in fact happend more than once.

Claus, Mikkel,

Could either of you guys shed some light on how the spider works?

Let's suppose we have information on who is redirecting to your site, in my case there are at least 50 domains and probably much more (all belonging to the same 'network' of hijackers).

I know the domain names, IP addresses etc.

What kind of code can I place in my web page that redirects the spider to another web page of my domain that I can keep unindexed by using a robots.txt file?

The hijackers are using a code to redirect to my domain and the spider believes it is still their domain, so isn't there some additional code I can place somewhere that first identifies who the request is coming from and subsequently send them to a preset page? Isn't that what cloakers do?
Or is it impossible to differentiate because I have no information but the IP address of the spider regardless of whether or not it passes thru the hijacker's site or comes directly to mine?

Yes, if you want to identify spiders you can use either agent names or IP - or both, as most cloakers do. You can rely on referrer information from spidering as there most often isn't any.

Detection by agent name is very simple - the agent name is part of the http request the spiders make. However it is also very easy to spoof. So if the hijackers are realy evil they could potentially get through your system by sending you false agent information in the redirected http requests. On the other hand, keeping a valid IP database of spiders up to date is a huge task. Off course, you can also buy such lists but I do not use them myself so I can't judge the quality.

Or is it impossible to differentiate because I have no information but the IP address of the spider regardless of whether or not it passes thru the hijacker's site or comes directly to mine?

That's basically it. You don't know where it's been before it visits you.

Google has a whole lot of Googlebots, it could even be that the one that discovered the redirect isn't the same Googlebot that later visits your site.

Well then wouldn't there be a simple solution to the problem?
If Google simply carried a referrer with it then webmasters could protect their sites from hijackers. :rolleyes:

It wouldn't make any difference because the referrer field is just as easy to fake as the agent name :)

Even if googlebot turned up complete with the associated URL, and people could do something about it, it wouldn't be a solution because most people wouldn't know how to implement a fix for their sites.

But I don't think googlebot works in a way that could show a referrer. If I understand it correctly, what happens is that a googlebot (one of very many) gets the next URL from the list of URLs to spider, it gets the file and stores it, then it gets the next URL from the list, and so on. That's all it does. Quite seperately, a parser gets the next stored file and, in parsing it, it extracts the links from the file.

So a googlebot doesn't "crawl" a site in the way that it is easy to imagine - get a page, get the links from it, get the pages at the end of those links, and so on. The reason that googlebot appears to stay in a site for a while is because the URLs were put on the list together, so they come out in very close proximity. Search engine spiders don't actually crawl; they get one file and that's the end of it.

It means that there isn't a referrer in the sense that we usually mean. For each URL on the list, there is a linking URL in the system, but not a referrer as such.

That's a very simplistic view, but it's pretty much what happens with each type of "crawl".

Someone posted somewhere (don't ask me where exactly, because I don't remember) that a possible solution would be to add something to the robots.txt file that Google would acknowledge. Now, I suppose this could either be via robots.txt or a meta tag assigned to each page, or whatever. In any case, something along the lines of:

User-agent: googlebot
Disallow: 302redirect_from_outside_url

Probably a bad way to word it, but just an example of something to let Google know that if it encounters a 302 redirect from a url that is not within the same domain, then assume that it is not an authorized redirect from the site owner, therefore do not assign the page's content and value to the unauthorized redirecting site.

It isn't a perfect solution because 1) Google would have to agree to abide by it, and 2) Webmasters would have to be aware of it and implement it. But at least it would be a possible way out of the mess.

Allthough you are in principle right, PhilC, there is nothing that prevent a search engine to set any referrer they want in the referrer field. But off course, it will be a "fake" referrer. I've seen that happen in the past probably because they where testing if it gave them different results. I haven't seen it for a while though :)

Yes, they could bring the linking page URL as the referrer, and it may give some people a way of avoiding the effects. But I don't think it's a solution, because it would still leave most sites vulnerable through a lack of knowledge and/or a lack of skill in being able to do anything with it.

But what could we do even if googlebot brought the linking URL? At what point do the effects occur? After spidering the target page or when the redirect is seen? Since Google assigns the assets of the temporary page to the permanent one, it may be that they are assigned as soon as the redirect is seen if the temporary page is already in the index. By the time it gets round to the target page, the effects may be well entrenched into the system. The solution may need much more than the linking URL to be passed to us.

Somebody back down the thread suggested that we think about it from an engine's point of view, so I did - a little bit anyway, and only about 302s...

The 302 is supposed to be a temporary measure, and not permanent. It says that this URL is the permanent one, but use the page at the other URL for a while - until I tell you differently. So what does a search engine make of it? It knows that the orginal page/URL will be back in action before long, and it knows about backlinks that point to the temporary page. So, since the original page is the permanent one, why not assign the assets of the temporary page to it? In that way, the engines maintain the permanent URL in the index, which is desirable, because it means that the URL doesn't get dropped just because of a temporary measure, and they assign the content and backlinks of the temporary URL to it, because they are the current version of the permanent page. It makes sense.

It strikes me as being a reasonable thing to do, and it does make sense. It may well be that that's the reason for the 302 problem. If people didn't use the 302 in a way that it wasn't intended to be used, then the concept would have been a very good one. It would actually have been very helpful to people who had to use 302s as a temporary measure.

Understanding how the engine designers think, if that's the way they really think, doesn't help because we can't prevent people from using 302s in the wrong way, but it might provide a little insight into why the problem exists.

Some more thoughts...

(1) Yahoo!'s system of dealing with 302s may have been a lot different to Google's, which may be why they were able to come up with a solution so quickly. If what I've read is correct, then they too assigned the assets of the temporary URL to the permanent URL, but they may have done it in a much different way to Google, so that it was easier to fix. On the other hand, what is Yahoo!'s solution? (see #3)

(2) An easy fix for Google may be to only assign a URL's assets if the 302 redirects to a URL within the site. But I don't think that would work, and still maintain the engine's idea of what to do with 302s. It would cause problems for people who need a temporary redirect to a development site, for instance. Remember that 302s are for people, and not for engines.

(3) One solution would be to scrap the idea of maintaining URLs in the index altogether, and do it the simple way. If a 302 is encountered, drop the URL from the index, add the temporary URL to the spider's list, and let it take its turn as a new page. If the page is already indexed, it's no problem - it just gets an extra crawl. If the 302 really was a temporary measure, when the new page vanishes, drop it from the index, and let the orginal page get found again and take its turn as a new page with or without backlinks. It would be much simpler for the engines, but I don't think people who use the 302 for its intended purpose would like it.

(4) Another possibility would be to simply index the 302 page as normal, knowing that it will be back in action as the normal page in the near future, and to ignore the fact that it's a 302. But that would be no good to the engines, and to many other people, because it would provide people with an acceptable auto-redirect method. 302s can contain a lot of optimized content, which could achieve high rankings, and the auto-redirect would be acceptable. The engines are not going to allow that.

(5) Yet another possibility would be to use a custom entry in the robots.txt file that allows 302s and similar redirects, as someone suggested earlier. When a 302 is encountered that points to a different site, check the robots.txt file on the remote site for the custom entry before assigning the assets. If the entry exists, carry on as now. If it doesn't exist, simply drop the permanent URL from the index and leave it at that. It would be an opt-in only, so the sites of people who aren't aware of it won't get hijacked, and people who want to use the 302 in the proper way, are likely to learn that the opt-in is also needed.

If I've done a reasonable job of seeing it from an engine's point of view, then the 302 problem is not a bug - it is a correct way of handling 302s, and they have to be handled in some way - they can't be ignored.

302s are a legitimate redirect only for entities which own both the domains involved in the 302, but the ability for anyone to say via a 302 that the content of my site is now located at Google.com is ludicrous.

The problem it seems to me lies in the fact that the present handling of 302 redirects allows anyone to redirect to any page, which would not seem to be the original intent of the 302 specificaion.

A simple and practical solution would be to insure that the page the 302 is being redirected to in fact allows 302 redirects aimed at it. We have recently seen how the search industry can solve problems of importance to themselves by the speed with which the rel="nofollow" tag was implemented. If Google really wants to fix it all they have to do IMO is to impement a meta tag (or robots.text entry) which says 302="allow". If the page does not have such a tag the 302s are not allowed, while those who want to redirect legitimately would have to add the tag or comment to thier site or page for the search engines to take notice.

This does not have to affect the way that 302s are processed by a browser.

See note 5 in the previous post Mel ;)

I thought that that was the best solution too. As far as I can tell, it leaves a smaller problem than any other solutions. Engines have to handle 302s, and there's no way they can tell if one is "official" without consulting the destination, except when it points to within the same site.

I can't help but think that Yahoo!'s solution must have more shortcomings that this solution.

I realize that you covered that point in your post Phil, my post was more to emphasize that it would not be much of a hassle for either webmasters or search engines (if they have the same level of interest that they did with the rel="nofollow" tag) to handle this , and that it is IMO the most logical way to handle it.

I agree. I prefer the sitewide robots.txt idea for ease of use, but a meta tag would be satisfactory. Both would be even better.


So come on Google. I don't believe it's a bug, and I don't believe it's your fault, but it *is* a problem that is bad for your search results, and much worse for victims, so, in the words of the subject of this thread, "fix it" - please.

Here's a nice article (http://clsc.net/research/google-302-page-hijack.htm) about the 302 problem. I found the article from this thread (http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/showthread.php?t=4692). The author says that the googlebot that receives the 302 goes straight to the target page to get the content for the 302 page's URL, and that that's how the target's content becomes associated with the 302's URL. The author says that he's been studying it for a long time. The immediate crawling can easily be checked, so he may have done it.

There is obviously a little more to it, because the backlinks and PageRank are also associated with the 302's URL, but he does say that he's written the article with simplicity in mind.

If the googlebot does get the target page's content immediately, then it should be no problem to check the robots.txt file, or a meta tag, for an opt-in. Googlebot gets the robots.txt file before anything else, anyway. That part would be very easy to implement. Implementing the part after that wouldn't be as easy but it wouldn't be difficult.

It's great to see this on Slashdot. Let's all hope and prey that this is now fixed. Nearly 6 months now our site has gone from Number 1 to dissapered. PLEASE FIX IT. I have sent Googleguy an example and nothing was done 9well except for a bland response from Google saying "we see nothing wrong with that linking method").

They are right about that - there isn't anything wrong with the linking method - when it's used as it is intended to be used. Officially:- "The requested resource resides temporarily under a different URI."

But there's a lot wrong with the linking method when it's used as a permanent link.

Sorry about this - it's just a technical point, but it's better to be correct about things.

I'm doing a 302 test, and googlebot fetched the 302 page almost 24 hours ago, but it still hasn't gone for the target page. So it doesn't get the target page immediately as Claus said in his article. Or, if it does, it doesn't always do it.

Has any victim site owner ever tried to take control of the hijacking process by linking back to the hijacker's site with a 302 redirect? Just a thought.

That would be one for the engines....

I'm the permanent page

No I am

No your not, I am

No way! I'm the permanent page

etc.

etc.

etc.

:D

Since the engines are handling 302s, they must have taken that possibility into account (they ain't dumb). They could drop both pages, but it would be interesting to see what happens.

They could drop both pages

why both pages? there could be more than 2 pages.

My point was that a 3rd site could be used to point to the hijacking site, i mean the 3rd site could belong to the victim site owner.

I see what you mean - 302 back to a different page - the home page, for instance.

Has any victim site owner ever tried to take control of the hijacking process by linking back to the hijacker's site with a 302 redirect? Just a thought.

I tried this several months ago.
The one time I tried it both pages were dropped from the index.

Yeah i wrote that stuff PhilC - and it's not 100% correct in the finer details, that's true. A 100% accuracy level wasn't the intention either.

I just sat down one day and decided that now i had enough of this mess, so my priorities were getting the message out and describing it in sufficient detail to recognize and recreate the problem. After all, besides the concerns in SEO circles it is (was? i hope, soon) a security risk as well, and publishing exploits in the open seem to be the best way to get the holes closed.

Anyway, a lot has happened since then - sorry for not responding to this thread sooner. There are some rumours that people are starting to see some changes in supplemental listings - i hope this is a sign that things are improving.

GoogleGuy,

It is already 5 months since AllYouCanRead.com disappeared from your index and 2 days ago it's pagerank went from PR6 to PR2 because for both "www.allyoucanread.com" and "cache:allyoucanread.com" Google is now showing grackelfish.com/link.php?id=58

http://64.233.161.104/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&q=cache%3Awww.allyoucanread.com
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&q=www.allyoucanread.com

I brought similar problem to Google's attention on January 2005, this time both cache and search results were showing http://www.hexafind.com/getLink-1432639.html

Here is the copy of an email received from Google on January 5, 2005
----------------------
Thank you for your reply, and for the additional information you provided.
We apologize for any confusion.

We have passed your email on to our engineering team for further
investigation. We appreciate your patience, and your taking the time to
bring this to our attention.

Regards,
The Google Team


Original Message Follows:
------------------------
Subject: Re: [#18090957] In the search result it is NOT our URL
Date: Tue, 4 Jan 2005 15:37:18 -0500

Thank you for your reply!

Could please look at the URL for that search result more carefully:

http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&lr=&safe=off&c2coff=1&q=www.allyoucanread.com&btnG=Search

it is NOT our URL - www.allyoucanread.com, it links to
http://www.hexafind.com/getLink-1432639.html

The same with cached copy; it shows cached copy of the same
http://www.hexafind.com/getLink-1432639.html page, not our home page.
--------------------------------

Can you please help with this issue? After 4 months receiving this email still no response...

About AllYouCanRead.com - AllYouCanRead.com is one of the largest online directories of 23,000 newspapers and magazines from 200 countries. USA Today selected us as a Hot Site of Year 2001 just after 3 months of our launch, received Incredibly Useful Site title by Yahoo Internet Life shortly after that.

The URL that Google lists for "www.allyoucanread.com" 301s to allyoucanread, but I can't find the URL in the gracklefish site? I can find a number of straight links but not the redirecting URL. Has gracklefish changed the links?

PhilC,

The URL that Google lists for "www.allyoucanread.com" 301s to allyoucanread, but I can't find the URL in the gracklefish site? I can find a number of straight links but not the redirecting URL. Has gracklefish changed the links?

I noticed that also, I think they changed their site after Google indexed our site with their redirect url. For this type of Google errors we are already 5 months do not receive any referrals from Google (from 10,000 referrals per day now we are down to 60-90 referrals), besides, Google indexes only 100-150 pages instead of previously indexed 24,000 pages. And on top of that our PageRank dropped from PR6 to PR2. Very nice!!!

Can somebody give any directions how this type of error can be fixed or at least how to bring it to the Google's attention so they will not send only automotized responds and instead correct their error?

Any hints?

Heres a hypothetical solution.

Deny google in your robots.txt file. Then immediately put in an emergency removal request at Google for the page with the redirect. Not necessarily the page with the “link” on it, but the page that actually is redirected. I think G spiders the url in the removal request pretty quickly and it should see your robots deny and remove the redirected page. Then you must quickly remove G from the robots txt and hope they come back soon. This should work but for how long? Has anyone tried this?

I seem to recall Googleguy specifically saying not to do this but to email him with the details and the word canonicalpage in the title.

it's not fixed yet... We were naïve to think it was going to get fixed - it does not seem like it.

care to elaborate?
it's not fixed yet... We were naïve to think it was going to get fixed - it does not seem like it.

It dosn't take much investigation to see that the problem is still the same. I have seen fresh examples very recently and old examples still exsist.