The act of page hijacking with concerns to the search engine world can produce long ranging results, especially for the web site or page targeted by the attack.
Page hijacking is such a big deal because it allows unscrupulous site owners (the hijacker), through use of a 302 redirect, to achieve search engine rankings from the hard work of another site or page (the hijack victim).
Essentially, by employing the redirect and targeting another person’s site, you can receive the search engine benefits intended for their work.
For a comprehensive explanation concerning 302 redirect hijacks, please read Claus Schmidt’s resource page.
Because this is such an unscrupulous method of behavior, imagine the surprise if something like this was to happen to Google on their search engine Now imagine no more because it’s actually happened.
According to JenSense’s excellent write-up, this very thing is being done to Google (!!!) and their AdSense landing page.
As indicated by JenSense, when you perform a Google search for the keyword “Google+Search”>Google AdSense”, the first position result is a site with the URL www.all-in-one-business.com/adsense/. When this result is clicked, instead of going to an All In One Business page about AdSense, users are redirected to the Google AdSense homepage.
Not only is www.all-in-one-business.com/adsense/ receiving the top position in the Google search results, the hijacker page is also receiving a PageRank of 9. However, this observation must be done quickly because of the redirect being used.
This means not only does the redirect page receive high PR scores, but the Google cache of the www.all-in-one-business.com/adsense/ page also shows the AdSense homepage. This indicates just how thorough the 302 redirect hijack method is.
Another area of benefit for the AdSense hijack page has to do with the amount of backlinks pointing to the page in question. When you perform a backlink check (link:www.all-in-one-business.com/adsense/), Google indicates the hijack page has around 3040 links pointing to it.
However, once you inspect these pages providing the backlinks, you discover these pages are actually pointing the Google AdSense homepage. Meaning that when you hijack a page, not only do you gain the target site’s search engine result, the act also credits the hijacker site with backlinks intended for the victim.
What JenSense’s investigation proves is just how effective 302 hijacks can be. Only by using this underhanded method can an affiliate site like all-in-one-business.com be considered more relevant than the Google AdSense start page.
Update: Instead of using an independent 302 redirect to accomplish the hijack, all-in-one is using a using a meta redirect command, which is placed in the header portion of a page’s html like so:
<META HTTP-EQUIV=”Refresh” CONTENT=”0; URL=https://www.google.com/adsense/”>
According to Danny Sullivan, the fast redirect is being handled by Google like it would a normal 302 redirect.
Chris Richardson is a search engine writer and editor for Murdok. Visit Murdok for the latest search news.
