All of Earth dot com, 302's & DMOZ

This, my friends, is 302s on an industrial scale. A site that has taken all the 4 million Open Directory lisings, and put a 302 on them.

I came across a number of their sites while I was removing 302's from my own sites. AllofEarth runs a family of sites, one for each of the 50 US states, plus around 70 individual country sites. You can read about that company here

The basis of each state/country site is the same template, with listings taken from, you've guessed it, The Open Directory. As far as I can see all these listings have had 302 redirects put on. I have taken a random selection of entries, run them through a header checker, and each time I get "HTTP/1.1 302 Object moved"

A few samples of the sites and the 302 redirects are:-

http://www.alloftennessee.com/goto.asp?link_no=4496
for Ramada , there are over 50,000 302’s for this state
http://www.allofgeorgia.com/goto.asp?link_no=9555
This is for an inn in Georgia. over 20000 302s here in Georgia
http://www.allinnewyork.com/goto.asp?link_no=11425
A Holiday Inn, of over 30,000 302s in New York.

And so on for all states apparently over a MILLION 302's from this series of sites

For all my own sites that have been snared by these people, I have been able to free them using the tip posted in my blog yesterday "Back to work", and remove the offending page on the AllofEarth site from Googles index. Something that Google claim I should not be able to do, but also 302s are something that Google seem unable to police.

Googles own website says on its "Facts & Fiction" page

Fiction: A competitor can ruin a site's ranking somehow or have another site removed from Google's index.
Fact: There is almost nothing a competitor can do to harm your ranking or have your site removed from our index. Your rank and your inclusion are dependent on factors under your control as a webmaster, including content choices and site design.

Quite patently 302s do effect adversely the ranking of any sites that suffer from them, my sites certainly have suffered a loss of Google ranking. So effectively this site is reducing the ranking of any site listed in Open Directory. But for what purpose you may say? One would assume that it is to make their site rank better, if all the decent sites are knocked in Google serps.

So how do they make money - its from PPC adverts or "sponsorship" with a minimum bid of 3 cents a click (I would doubt that any of their advertisers are paying any more). The pages I looked at seemed to have particularly miss targeted ads, for example this hotel page in the state of Georgia has 4 sponsored ads, 3 of which are for UK companies that do not do any business in the state of Georgia. But I digress...

The Open Directory has over 4 million sites listed, so any of their AllofEarth pages that have been indexed by Google will have been 302ed by AllofEarth. My own experience is that the majority have been indexed, particularly the US listings. And certainly all the listings in AllofEarth directories that have not been "sponsored" appear to have been 302ed by AllofEarth.

302s are getting out of hand when you see it being done on this scale. Can anyone tell me why they are 302ing every site on Open Directory, if the intent is not to harm the Google ranking of those competing sites?

This is not just one guy with a good idea of turning DMOZ into 302s, others are doing it too.So there are 4 million times "x" 302s out there, where "x" is number of sites using DMOZ to create 302s. Its probably a number so large that it would make the population of China seem like a small number.