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Page hijacking is a form of search engine index spamming. It is achieved by creating a rogue copy of a popular website which shows contents similar to the original to a web crawler, but redirects web surfers to unrelated or malicious websites. Spammers can use this technique to achieve high rankings in result pages for certain key words.

Page hijacking is a form of cloaking, made possible because some web crawlers detect duplicates while indexing web pages. If two pages have the same content, only one of the URLs will be kept. A spammer will try to ensure that the rogue website is the one shown on the result pages.

[edit] Case Study: Google jacking

One form of this activity involves 302 server-side redirects on Google. Hundreds of 302 Google Jacking pages were said to have been reported to Google.^{[citation needed]} While Google has not officially acknowledged that page hijacking is a real problem, several people have found to be victims of this phenomenon when checking the search engine rankings for their website.

[edit] Example of page hijacking

Suppose that a website offers difficult to find sizes of clothes. A common search entered to reach this website is really big t-shirts, which - when entered on popular search engines - made the website show up as the first result:

SpecialClothes

Offering clothes in sizes you cannot find elsewhere.

www.example.com/

A spammer working for a competing company then creates a website that looks extremely similar to one listed and includes a special redirection script that redirects web surfers to the competitor's site, but shows the page to web crawlers. After several weeks, a web search for really big t-shirts then shows the following result:

SpecialClothes

Offering clothes in sizes you cannot find elsewhere... at better prices!

www.example.net/

—Show Similar Pages—

Notice how .com changed to .net, as well as the new "Show Similar Pages" link.

When web surfers click on this result, they are redirected to the competing website. The original result was hidden in the "Show Similar Pages" section.

[edit] References

• "Google Regains Its Hijacked Listing; This Was A Big Deal, Folks!", SearchEngineWatch (May 26, 2005). 
• "I heard Google needs more examples of 302 hijacking (entry #5)", SearchEngineWatch (02-08-2005, 11:45 AM). 

[edit] See also

• Google bomb
• Homepage hijack
• Link farm
• Mousetrapping
• Spamdexing
• TrustRank

[edit] External links

• Page Hijack: The 302 Exploit, Redirects and Google
• 302 Google Jacking - Has your page been hijacked?
• Matt Cutts: Discussing 302 Redirects
• Redirects: Permanent 301 vs. Temporary 302 see diagram of 302 hijack

[edit] Tools and Information for Webmasters

• Webmaster Forums at the Open Directory Project
• Online tool that detects spam techniques on web pages
• A paper explaining various methods to determine webpage/blog spam
• A public, searchable database of blog spam pages or spam blogs
• AIRWeb' 05: First Workshop on Adversarial Information Retrieval on the Web - Research on search engine spamming