Back to work

Back in the UK now, and happily the sun is shining in Cornwall, cos I need it to shine. I started reading various posts that had cropped up whilst we had been ambling through Spain and across the Bay of Biscay.

I delved into this Post by Jason at Threadwatch on the 302 hijack problem, he pointed out that a poster called Idaho had given simple directions on how to check your own sites for the 302 problem.... and boy did I have the problem.

So far I have removed, apparently successfully about 20 hijacks, following the route given. There are a number of other ones that are using cloaking in the redirect, and I'll have to work round that one.

Lets start with Idaho's post, which is very clearly written

My site was doing very well in the SERPs. For over 2 years it had been on the first page for a competitive term (1.2 million listings). Then during the first week in January my site disappeared and traffic tanked for no obvious reason.

When searching for "site:www.mydomain.com" I noticed that my index page often wasn't listed or it appeared on about page 3 or 4 of the results after all my supplemental pages.

A search for "allinurl:mysite.com" often didn't show my index page at all but instead showed somebody else's domain (located in Turkey). When I clicked on this link, my site came up. When I clicked on the cached version of the site, it showed a very old cache of the page. This same site also showed up after all my results when doing a "site:www.mydomain.com"

Using a header checker tool on the site's URL I was able to see it was using a 302 link to my site.

Last night.. I went to Google.com and ... I found instructions on how to remove the page.

I then clicked on the "urgent" link.

Then:
1. I signed up for an account with Google and replied back to them from an email they sent me;
2. I added the "noindex" meta tag according to their instructions and uploaded it to my site;
3. Using the instructions to remove a single page from the Google index, I added the hijacker's URL that was pointing to my site. (copy and paste from the result found on "allinurl" search)
4. I got a message back saying that the request would be taken care of within 24 hours. The URL that I entered showed on the upper right hand part of the screen saying "removal of (hijacker's url)pending."
5. I then removed the "noindex" meta tag from my page and re-uploaded it to my site.

This morning the google account still shows the url removal as "pending" but when I do "site:" and "allinurl" searches the offending URL is gone and my index URL is back.

So it appears that one can remove the 302 hijacking page. I have been through all my sites and got Google to accept 20 of them for removal.

However... that is not all the damage, there are roughly the same number of other dodgy sites that come up in "allinurl" but I cannot remove, as they are cloaking Googlebot from spidering the page they are using for the hijacking. In fact the same sort of cloaking that Google banned some of their own pages for recently

It appears pointless, futile, and a waste of nervous energy contacting Google - all I get is a canned reply when I try to get any help with the problem.

In addition there is further fraud with a few sites that are framing mine, then putting their own AdSense round the framed site.

It would seem to me that Google could get on top of this by following up on scraper URLs that are submitted to them. But do they have the inclination - at present the answer appears to be NO.