HELP!!! Our URL has been Hijacked

[John Maggio]

I should have come here sooner...

I had a website: http://www.hawkretrofit.com which sold window and door hardware (one of my side projects that did pretty good) I had a very good natural ranking in google at one time.

I sold the site to a larger company that sells glass and related and we added a new URL: http://www.glassdistributorsinc.com. I still update the site, but do not handle the billing etc...

Glass Distributors let my valuable URL www.hawkretrofit.com expire, and a Hijacker (someone who waits till you expire, and buys your URL on an auction based on your monthly visits, then changes your URL and pages into a link farm and gets revenue from PPC until you realize it and try to get it back, but they want to sell back to you for thousands of $$$)

Ovcouse hits plummit (except for our Adsense and Yahoo PPC)

Now all the Search engines have the hawkretrofit pages indexed and not any of the glassdistributorsinc pages indexed.

Worse yet it seems that Google still refers to the old URL for GDI pages.

Ex...
http://www.google.com/search?q=site:www.glassdistributorsinc.com/
http://www.google.com/search?q=allinurl:www.glassdistributorsinc.com/
http://www.google.com/search?q=link:www.glassdistributorsinc.com/
http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:www.glassdistributorsinc.com/
http://www.google.com/search?q=info:www.glassdistributorsinc.com/
http://www.google.com/search?q=related:www.glassdistributorsinc.com/

Basically I want to set Google and the other engines straight, and have them stop sending traffic to the hawkretrofit URL and proceed to send traffic to the glassdistributorsinc URL.

ATM it seems that the www.hawkretrofit.com is down, but if you review the cache you will get a note of what they did to my precious URL.

I knew it was bad but not this bad. When I just did a google site map (10min ago) i relized that google was reffering to this older URL.

What can I do? :eek:

[myebux]

Sorry to hear about that. I had the same thing happen to me. Its no fun. First, remove the 302 redirect. Then I would try to get a 301 redirect setup, many times this will transfer page rank etc. Then submit an xml sitemap and finally, contact google and explain your situation.

Good Luck

Steve

[calebw]

If the buyer of your site has any trademark rights to the domain you could pursue legal recourse to attempt and retain ownership of the domain, however this is often costly, time-consuming, difficult, and may not work. It is a grave problem when this kind of thing happens, but I almost want to laugh because retaining ownership of a domain in the first place is so cheap... but execs or someone in an organization often doesn't see the value in spending $12 a year and then, voila, they run into problems like this!

At any rate... myebux has good advice. Google probably will lend a listening ear to your plight.

One thing I noticed is that it seems Google's cache of the hawk domain is fresh; Google results contain the same text as your new domain, yet when I go to the hawk domain it shows the ads... perhaps they are doing content cloaking of some sort? If so, that would help your case with Google and getting the old domain removed from the index.

All the best.

-Caleb

[John Maggio]

How should I go about contacting Google?

What is a 301, and 302 redirect?

Hey guys Happy New Year, and Thank you for repling and helping out my problem.

[myebux]

Here's some stuff to help you out. I couldn't find that Google Contact form that I used

Happy New Year and Good Luck

Steve


302 Redirect (BAD REDIRECT)

<meta·http-equiv="refresh"·content="0;·url=http://www.yoururl.com">

http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum30/28650-5-10.htm

http://clsc.net/research/google-302-page-hijack.htm


301 Redirect (GOOD REDIRECT)

301 redirect is the most efficient and Search Engine Friendly method for webpage redirection. It's not that hard to implement and it should preserve your search engine rankings for that particular page. If you have to change file names or move pages around, it's the safest option. The code "301" is interpreted as "moved permanently".

301 Redirect in PHP

<?
Header( "HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently" );
Header( "Location: http://www.new-url.com" );
?>

http://www.webconfs.com/how-to-redirect-a-webpage.php

[calebw]

302 Redirect (BAD REDIRECT)

<meta·http-equiv="refresh"·content="0;·url=http://www.yoururl.com">

Actually, the above is not a 302 redirect. "302" refers to one of the HTTP Response Codes (301, 404, 500, 200, etc... are all response codes). Using a Meta refresh (as described above) is not a good idea and it is not the same as a 302.

There are two kinds of redirects: 1) 301 – Permanently moved and, 2) 302 – Temporarily moved. The HTTP 1.1 Protocol RFC 2616 (http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec10.html) defines these status codes as:

301 Status Code
The requested resource has been assigned a new permanent URI and any future references to this resource SHOULD use one of the returned URIs. Clients with link editing capabilities ought to automatically re-link references to the Request-URI to one or more of the new references returned by the server, where possible. This response is cacheable unless indicated otherwise.

302 Status Code
The requested resource resides temporarily under a different URI. Since the redirection might be altered on occasion, the client SHOULD continue to use the Request-URI for future requests. This response is only cacheable if indicated by a Cache-Control or Expires header field.

In other words: 301 = page1.htm is now at page2.htm, don't come back to page1.htm, always go to page2.htm from now on. 302 = page1.htm is temporarily at page2.htm, so keep coming back to page1.htm in the future.


Here are some other resources:


Hypertext Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.1 RFC 2616 (http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec10.html)
Redirects and Rewriting (SE Watch Forum) (http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/showthread.php?t=3338)


I recommend following Steve's 301 redirect instructions if you do need to implement 301 redirects.

Good luck!

[myebux]

Thanx caleb. Here's a cool tool you can use to check your redirects.

http://www.internetofficer.com/redirect-check.html

[gehrlekrona]

Now I might just stupid, but how can he redirect a URL that is not his anymore? Don't you redirect FROM the old site?

[myebux]

Technically speaking, he can't, unless he has FTP access, but he can try to get the offending website to do it for him.

[gehrlekrona]

That's what I was thinking. I am not sure though that they would redirect to his site if they are using it for Google ads.... :(

[myebux]

True. But, at least, they could remove the 302 and maybe even contact google on his behalf. We will see.