Google Page Hijacking Still Going Strong

[Marcia]

It was posted about here by DaveN about two and a half years ago, and it's now showing its head full force with tens of thousands of pages showing up rather than the pages of the sites affected.

Come On Google, Fix It

I found this just this week when doing an inurl: search for one of my domains, and it's the OTHER site that shows up instead of my homepage. A search for that site by name has always brought the site up - but no more, it's nowhere to be found.

One domain causing it to happen has over 50K hijacked pages duplicated and in the index on their domain, and another has many, many thousands and is running Adsense. They're both anonymous proxies.

It doesn't matter much with this particular site of mine, but that isn't the point, and it isn't the case with many, many sites out there. For company sites that often get searched for by name (whether brand name, company name or product name), for users this represents a very poor quality of search results.

It's true that the average user doesn't use the inurl: or site: search, but yes, they sure do search for Acme Widgets and when acmewidgets.com doesn't come up for them, as they'd expect it to, that isn't a satisfactory result.

Not to mention that it's totally killing legitimate traffic and well-earned, legitimate income for sites being affected, who deserve the traffic they've lost through this, or they would not have had their original Google rankings in the first place.

[JohnW]

Is it a 302, or is it a proxy hijack?

[Marcia]

They're anonymous proxy sites, both of those.

[JohnW]

Yeah, I have seen it a few times myself.

Here's how we handle this:
1.file DMCA complaint
2.add a base href tag
3.detect and block the IPs of the proxies.

[Marcia]

file DMCA complaint

So does Google then take just the one page out that a webmaster files a complaint on, and leave the other 50K+ pages in there, with other webmasters not knowing what hit them when their traffic is gone?

How does Google handle it?

[DaveN]

if it only it was as simple has blocking an IP..

Dmca didn't work for me

I have seen anonproxy sites rotating IP address, and cloaking the real one that google gets ..

DaveN

[Marcia]

It's already up to over 69K on this one:

Google Search

And now close to 7K on this one

[evilgreenmonkey]

/me quickly checks his proxy sites before they're outed

[JohnW]

>So does Google then take just the one page out that a webmaster files a complaint on, and leave the other 50K+ pages in there, with other webmasters not knowing

G will remove the page with a properly submitted DMCA. And yes, the other webmasters have to figure it out.

>How does Google handle it?

Well if you think back to late 04 or so to when Google first “handled” the 302 hijack, the first thing they did was break the site: command so you couldn’t see hijacked pages anymore. Maybe the inurl operator will be next ;-)

[gabs]

One interesting thing to me is the Sup's start at 475

http://www.google.com/search?q=site:...a rt=450&sa=N

Number 475 seems to be a odd number, like a magic number ?..

[gabs]

Adsense on the cache

http://209.85.135.104/search?sourcei...2Ftopsites.php

Banned/via ip/removed I guess ?

[Marcia]

Well, I did a little more digging and found a 302 hijacking working just fine, alive and well and still kicking. So it's not all over with 302's. The go.php redirect page's URL is showing with the snippet of the page being "linked to" right there in the SERPs. Just like what was happening back in 2005.

[willx32]

worked my butt off listing items in an online store.
the search submission went fine and started getting around 100-200 hits a day.
about a few days later, WAM! another site stole my 100-200 hit/day listing.

so, yes! page hijacking is still going around.

Just report them to the search engines!
they will be glad enough to remove your duped listings if you find out who is doing it and report them to their ISP.

[Iktinos]

since when the people is being asking for a way to get more clicks?
Then, don't be surprised if the thing runs out of control.
WEBSEARCH should not be related to any interest since information is on jopardy. But then again, how to search without massive resources?
Maybe is time to diversify our searchhounds.