"Beware of Google Hijacking"

Shortly after we sent a special-pleading email to Google genius Matt Cutts (see below), a Google Image search for "spongebob" appeared in the stats, linking to the hijacked Google results (above) we've been tearing our hair out over the last couple of days. The searcher's IP address was 74.197.204.66 (Suddenlink Communications) in Tyler, Texas. What goes on here?

Tedium alert to our readers. This piece is mostly on the technical side — we barely understand much of it, ourselves — and could produce yawns:

"This problem shouldn't exist and need not exist. Finding out that your site has suddenly lost most of its traffic because of an HTML trick is a lousy way to start the day," wrote Brian Livingston in a November 2005 Datamation article — much thanks to commenter quieti for the link — "Beware of Google Hijacking." Exactly what happened to us a few days back, as blogged here. Livingston explains:

If you come to work one morning and find that your company's traffic from Google has fallen to nothing, a competitor may be redirecting traffic from your site to his. Amazingly, there may be little or nothing you can do to stop this blatant rip-off. The cause is an obscure HTML command that is interpreted poorly by Google but correctly by Yahoo and some other search engines [including MSNs Live Search]. Knowing about the trick at least gives you some hope of understanding it — if it happens to you.

"If you think your web site's traffic is flowing to some other party, Google has a form you can fill out to report it," notes Livingston:

Matt Cutts, a Google search quality engineer, links to the form in his blog and says complaints that are submitted there "will get the same level of investigation" they would if he personally was notified. You'll have to try it to find out if that's so.

We clicked on over to Cutts's Gadgets, Google and SEO blog, where salvation seemed so near and yet so far:

What do you do if you suspect a “302 hijacking” but don’t have my email address? … Go to http://www.google.com/support/bin/request.py and click “I’m a webmaster inquiring about my website” then select “Why my site disappeared from the search results or dropped in ranking” and click continue.

The promised options were no longer available at that Google support link, so we rolled up our cybersleeves and dived back into the fray. Somewhere along the way in Google Webmaster Help we extrapolated the email address to Google's webmaster and sent off a message headlined "302 hijacking, Attn: Matt Cutts":

I’m a blogger whose #1 spot from a Google Web Search and Google Image Search for "spongebob" — for my post "How to get a zillion hits on your blog" — has apparently been hijacked by something called SquidWho.

Type in "spongebob" in a Google search, and you arrive here.

Click on the top left image on that page, and Google directs you to a link to my post — a link responsible for about 300-400 extra hits daily for the last period of time — but as of a couple of days ago, the searcher is then automatically redirected to the hijacker's page. Also, once you are at the hijacker's page, you can't go back to Google.

I have blogged about the issue in my post "How to LOSE a zillion hits on your blog."

'Am hoping you, Mr. Cutts, will be able to help me right this wrong. I read about your work in your post "Bacon polenta" via Brian Livingston's post "Beware of Google Hijacking."

We're just looking for credit where credit is due.

Comments

[goomp]

Is it possible to re-highjack?