Googlejack Test
Type the following into the nearest Google searchbox:
allinurl:yourdomain.com
Look through the results. If you see a Title and Description that are identical to your site with the URL for another site underneath it, you may have been pagejacked, or as I say it, Googlejacked.
Technical Details:
Two primary types of redirects are used on the web - 301's and 302's. A 301 redirect means 'moved permanently.' This is the type of redirect you should use most of the time if you care about search engines. The other type, a 302 redirect, basically means 'moved temporarily.' When someone redirects to your site using the 302 method, Google seems to be associating their website (i.e. their URL) with your page (i.e. your CONTENT.)
Why Googlejack?
Before you fire off a cease & desist letter, keep in mind that a lot of people are doing this unknowingly by using link directory software that utilizes the 302 redirect for some reason. They may not know they're potentially harming your site by linking to it.
However, it's entirely possible (imho) for a nefarious, blackhat SEO to use a 302 redirect from a throwaway domain to negatively influence your website rankings. Yes Virginia, SEO SPAM scum exist and they'll try all they can to make money, no matter who they hurt. They live to try to game the search engines.
What to Do?
I haven't seen a lot of specifics on how to solve this problem yet, but it seems some people have had their site recover from being 302 Googlejacked. Personally, I'd recommend emailing the kind folks over at Google to let them know about the potential problem. Second, keep building new, relevant and interesting content. It's what the web's about. Finally, don't put all your eggs in one basket - try optimizing for the other two big engines (Yahoo and MSN) as well.
1969 Cache Hippies
During my quest to find out more about the 302 Googlejacking problem, I ran across another bug/feature that might be related to the 302 redirect problem. If you check the cache dates of some of the pages in Google, you'll notice a 1969 last indexed date. I can hear you now. "What!? Google wasn't invented until at least the 80s, man!" Before you fire off a memo to CBS, though, notice that this is most likely a default Unix date put there as a placeholder. While I've noticed that my Googlejacked pages also have the screwy 1969 cache date, others say the two things are not related. The theory I've read that I agree with most is that the two problems are somehow interacting with each and making things worse for webmasters everywhere.
Update Allegra
Once again named by Webmaster World, Google Update Allegra started on Feb. 2. The thread there already has over 30 pages. A lot to wade through, no? Well, there wasn't a lot of new info that I saw, just more rehashing of the old; wait for MSN, Google is broke, I notice no changes, I hate Google, I love Google, hey where's GoogleGuy, this is all because they're a public company now, this is all because of Adwords, this is all because of Adsense, etc. ad nauseum. There are some good observations, though. Learn to skim faster, grasshopper. What I pulled from the first 20 or so pages is that this update is attempting to fix some things from last December's update.
SE Wars Episode V: The (MS) Empire Strikes Back
While not a big player yet (pre-Longhorn), Microsoft's new MSN search is out on the web. While I still get nowhere near the amount of traffic I receive from Google, the MSN piece of the pie is growing, along with Yahoo. It's going to be an interesting couple of years in the search engine world.
Exhaustive List of Webmaster World Links (Thanks to claus at Webmaster World for most of these links):
- Incorrect URLs and Mirror URLs (Nov 26, 2004)
- MSN Search PageJacking Critical Flaw (Nov 12, 2004)
- Dupe content checker - 302's - Page Jacking - Meta Refreshes (Sept 7, 2004)
- Is there a new filter? (May 4, 2004)
- Big problem with Yahoo (Apr 30, 2004)
- PR 7 - 0 and Address Nightmare (Apr 28, 2004)
- Problem with Googlebot and robots.txt? (Apr 12, 2004)
- Meta Refresh leads to ... (Mar 18, 2004)
- weird link showing up for my site in Web results (Feb 10, 2004)
- Google indexing redirect pages (Jan 31, 2004)
- free hosting sites banned from google? (Jan 31, 2004)
- Is using a redirect to track outward bound links bad? (Jan 27, 2004)
- Our company Lisiting is being redirected. (Jan 5, 2004)
- 302 Redirects showing ultimate domain (Dec 21, 2003)
- Strange results in Allinurl (Dec 20, 2003)
- Domain name mixup (Dec 9, 2003)
- Using Redirects (Nov 17, 2003)
- redesigns, redirects, & google -- oh my! (Oct 22, 2003)
- Google Partial Indexing? (Oct 21, 2003)
- Not sure but I think it is Page Jacking (Oct 9, 2003)
- Unindexed URL Google Ranking Trick (Oct 9, 2003)
- http://click.fastsearch.com.... (Oct 8, 2003)
- Duplicate content - a google bug? (Sept 26, 2003)
- Banner ad redirect-page indexed as mirror site by Google (Aug 13, 2003)
- Indexed AlltheWeb pages causing Google duplicates (Aug 14, 2003)
- Banner ad redirect-page indexed as mirror site by Google (Aug 13, 2003)
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