302 Redirects and Page Hijacking

Up until recently it was possible to hijack the search results from a website to another website in the Google search engine indices. This article explains how using 302 page moved headers and pointing them at a page was used to steal traffic from other peoples domains.

What is a 302 Redirect?

A 302 redirect is a http header response redirect used to lett web browsers and search engines know that a document has been temporarily moved from one location to another. It is used ethically when you are moving a page from one place on your site to another, or onto another site for a short period of time. As may be the case when you are upgrading background technologies for a short period of time that would make this document unavailable otherwise.

How did this Page Hijacking Occur?

Unlike Javascript, meta redirects etc a 302 http header redirect is followable by search engines. Google was indexing the original page and seeing that it had moved to an other location. Google would continue to index the source of the redirect.

It was possible to exploit a hole in Google which meant that if you wanted traffic for a term you could place a 302 redirect to the best ranked page from your website and Google would accidentally send the traffic to your site. If testing for user-agents was conducted it was possible to determine what is Google and what was not. The 302 would only operate for spider visits and users, who had been mis-directed to the page would be presented with alternative information. Duly it is possible for someone to 'hijack' your website rankings and drive traffic to their website.

This hole in Google has now been closed and this unethical SEO technique no longer works for cheating your way to the top of the search engine indices.

List of Articles on Ethical Search Engine Optimization

: Hotel Industry Booking Study :: The Horror of Site Submit Pro :: What do you need from Your Site? :
: What is Page Rank? :: Page Rank is Dead - Myth or Reality :: The Replacement for Page Rank? :
: Latent Semantic Indexing :: Using Latent Semantic Indexing :: Robots.txt :
: Writing a robots.txt file :: Server Company Link Request :: Duplicate and Near Duplicate Content :
: Web Site Spiderability :: Big Daddy - the new face of Google :: Page Hijacking and 302 redirects :
: To Submit to Search Engines or not to Submit to Search Engines That is the Question? :: Know Your Customer to Know your User :: Black Hat SEO - Dont Do it! :
: April Fools in Search Engine Land :: Search Engines and Menus :: High Rankings - How do Search Engines fit into Your Business? :
: Google - Da Vinci Code the Game :: Removing the ODP description from your MSN listing :: Viewing the Google index from different Geographic Positions :
: Underused HTML Tags :: Company Law Amendment :

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