Important Thread At Webmaster World

On the odd chance you cant read the whole thread, here is the post that initiated the thread:

Dear readers,
It is now 100% certain that any site can destroy low to midrange pagerank sites by causing googlebot to snap up a 302 redirect via scripts such as php, asp and cgi etc supported by an unseen randomly generated meta refresh page pointing to an unsuspecting site. The encroaching site in many cases actually write your websites location URL with a 302 redirect inside their server. This is flagrant violation of copyright and manipulation of search engine robots and geared to exploit and destroy websites and to artificially inflate ranking of the offending sites.

Many unethical webmasters and site owners are already creating thousands of TEMPLATED (ready to go) SKYSCRAPER sites fed by affiliate companies immense databases. These companies that have your website info within their databases feed your page snippets, without your permission, to vast numbers of the skyscraper sites. A carefully adjusted variant php based redirection script that causes a 302 redirect to your site, and included in the script an affiliate click checker, goes to work. What is very sneaky is the randomly generated meta refresh page that can only be detected via the use of a good header interrogation tool.

Googlebot and MSMBOT follow these php scripts to either an internal sub-domain containing the 302 redirect or serverside and “BANG” down goes your site if it has a pagerank below the offending site. Your index page is crippled because googlebot and msnbot now consider your home page at best a supplemental page of the offending site. The offending sites URL that contains your URL is indexed as belonging to the offending site. The offending site knows that google does not reveal all links pointing to your site, takes a couple of months to update, and thus an INURL:YOURSITE.COM will not be of much help to trace for a long time. Note that these scripts apply your URL mostly stripped or without the WWW. Making detection harder. This also causes googlebot to generate another URL listing for your site that can be seen as duplicate content. A 301 redirect resolves at least the short URL problem so aleviating google from deciding which of the two URL’s of your site to index higher, more often the higher linked pagerank.

Your only hope is that your pagerank is higher than the offending site. This alone is no guarantee because the offending site would have targeted many higher pagerank sites within its system on the off chance that it strips at least one of the targets. This is further applied by hundreds of other hidden 301 permanent redirects to pagerank 7 or above sites, again in the hope of stripping a high pagerank site. This would then empower their scripts to highjack more efficiently. Sadly supposedly ethical big name affiliates are involved in this scam, they know it is going on and google adwords is probably the main target of revenue. Though I am sure only google do not approve of their adsense program to be used in such manner.

Many such offending sites have no e-mail contact and hidden WHOIS and no telephone number. Even if you were to contact them, you will find in most cases that the owner or webmaster cannot remove your links at their site because the feeds are by affiliate databases.

There is no point in contacting GOOGLE or MSN because this problem has been around for at least 9 months, only now it is escalating at an alarming rate. All pagerank sites of 5 or below are susceptible, if your site is 3 or 4 then be very alarmed. A skyscraper site only need create child page linking to get pagerank 4 or 5 without the need to strip other sites.

Caution, trying to exclude via robots text will not help because these scripts are nearly able to convert daily.

Trying to remove a link through google that looks like
new.searc**verywhere.co.uk/goto.php?path=yoursite.com%2F will result in your entire website being removed from google’s index for an indefinite period time, at least 90 days and you cannot get re-indexed within this timeline.

I am working on an automated 302 REBOUND SCRIPT to trace and counteract an offending site. This script will spider and detect all pages including sub-domains within an offending site and blast all of its pages, including dynamic pages with a 302 or 301 redirect. Hopefully it will detect the feeding database and blast it with as many 302 redirects as it contains URLS. So in essence a programme in perpetual motion creating millions of 302 redirects so long as it stays on. As every page is a unique URL, the script will hopefully continue to create and bombard a site that generates dynamically generated pages that possesses php, asp, cigi redirecting scripts. A SKYSCRAPER site that is fed can have its server totally occupied by a single efficient spider that continually requests pages in split seconds continually throughout the day and week.

If the repeatedly spidered site is depleted of its bandwidth, it may then be possible to remove it via googles URL removal tool. You only need a few seconds of 404 or a 403 regarding the offending site for google’s url console to detect what it needs. Either the site or the damaging link.

I hope I have been informative and to help anybody that has a hijacked site who’s natural revenue has been unfairly treated. Also note that your site may never gain its rank even after the removal of the offending links. Talking to offending site owners often result in their denial that they are causing problems and say that they are only counting outbound clicks. And they seam reluctant to remove your links….Yeah, pull the other one.

This explains a lot. Thanks for posting this, Professor. What can we do to stop this? It doesn’t look good at all. 😮

Thank you Lou for posting this thread. As far as a solution to this major problem we all need to give a lot of thought. It is not going away on its own and more scammers will utilize this in the near future now that it is out in the open. As wufu110 stated, “this explains a lot.”

This is a long one.

From that thread it seems this problem has gone on a long time. One of my sites was a victim of this in December. Hell, I wasn’t even trying to target anything competitive. What happened was at first I lost some of my rankings for these non-competitive phrases to the site that was linking to me through a redirect/click counter. (I didn’t link to them) Their link replaced my previous rankings in the SERPS with my title, description, & some text from my home page. It still redirected to my site when you clicked on it but Google hit me with a duplicate content penalty and threw every one of my phrases to the bottom. (Gbot decided my page was new and copying off the hijacker.) Almost 3 months later my previous SERPS are still stuck there. The offending site also has finally lost their rankings.

Does that help me though? No. Even though my site’s pages are still indexed & get crawled every day, for all intents & purposes, I may as well not be because of the penalty. Oh, and I wrote the owner of that site way back, explained the problem, and asked that he remove the link but got no reply. The link is still there. So imo he was aware of what he was doing – it was intentional. This guy’s site has hundreds if not thousands of links on it in this form.

And the suggestion from “googleguy” in those threads at WMW to write Google with examples and put “canonicalpage” in the subject so it gets to the engineers must be some sort of joke. Many have said they’ve done this. I tried to do it and the email he suggested we send them to wrote back (canned) for me to fill out G’s online form. I went there and you can’t write anything more than 1,000 characters. So forget trying to even explain this to them. And I’m pretty sure Mr. G Engineer with his millions in stock options is worried about by gambling site anway.

AFAIC all of these so called SEO experts and “googleguy” are scams. If the SEO people were the experts they claim to be why are they pissing around on message boards giving everyone advice with the hope someone will hire them. They should be out there getting #1 for Viagara or whatever and sitting on some island with drink in hand. And if they have those type of rankings why would they tell everybody else how to compete with them? I don’t believe that guy works for G. Seriously, why does every so-called “SEO Expert” run a message board or newsletter? Well, my basic common sense tells me that is where they make their money. Not because of their search engine expertise.

And another thing, does anyone notice how all of the SEO boards push submitting your sites to directories to help your rankings? Funny that some of the same directories are owned by well known SEO types. And even funnier, that some of the directories use the same type of click counters/redirects that can hijack newer sites. I don’t think it will be long before they figure out a way to get older sites in this manner, if they haven’t done it already. My advice is not to ever submit to any directory other than maybe DMOZ. I’ve got one directory listing that appears visually as a static link but is having the same effect on this same site of mine. It’s a popular one on the search engine/webmaster message boards. They all say this is a great directory to get into. Yes. It costs money too

Now the gbot loves this particular site that was targeted and thoroughly crawls it every day but it doesn’t change anything. So what is my plan? Do something I should have done a long time ago that someone on this board told me to do, and forget about G. By the end of this month I will ban their bots from all of my sites. I don’t have enough traffic anyway from them yet to consider this a loss. The bottom line is why create new content so these scumbags lying in wait can steal the rankings that result? Yahoo doesn’t have this problem with redirects. Apparently G wants a future results page that is nothing but millions of directories. In fact, I’m thinking about creating one just for this purpose. It will be my one G site.

Go MSN & Y. Screw G and all of these SEO experts kissing their ass.

I agree far too much time these days is spent understanding what Google wants, which is not what the internet is about. Its about creating useful and unique content and I think Yahoo offers more varied search results in this respect. Its about time Google got knocked off its perch! :banger:

this is (I think) what I was talking about with the duplication of sites being done and if you recall I had said look at the sponsor on the page to know who is to blame for allowing it to happen.

What a bunch of scumbags.

This problem is getting worse by the day.

I would like to hear from Affiliate programs – if you don’t condone that sort of black hat SEO behavior among your affiliates, please let us all know so we can give you preferential treatment.

We want to know who is on our side!

just a few days/months and counter attack measures will be in place against the offending website.

Here is a wise comment about this issue :nono: found on another board:

Quote: “That is so pathetic. 302’s are nothing to worry about.

This guy needs to grow up. Simply redirecting people via jump.cgi will NOT affect your Google ranking, or theirs. To be honest, I think they are just trying to stir trouble.

We use jump.cgi on pretty much ALL our sites, and I’ve never had a problem, whereas someone’s Google PR or rankings are “downgraded” or damaged.

Personally, I would just tell this guy/girl that there is nothing wrong with jump.cgi … and they should be greatful for any traffic you send to them ” End Quote

Gossamer Threads

I would like you to remove my site from all your sites.

Displaying my design infringes on my copy right.