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Google AdSense Meta Refresh Hijacked
aaronwall writes "With the latest Google Update Bourbon it appears that Google has had their AdSense site hijacked in the search results by a meta refresh. In March GoogleGuy commented that this sort of activity usually happens to low quality websites."
I knew I should have gone with Microsoft...
Its not even true anymore if you search for "Adsense" or "google adsense" in google, you'll get the Google Adsense page.
I wouldn't mind you in my head, if you weren't so clearly mad -Lews Therin Telamon
In Googleguy's comment, he says that "spammy" sites with low pagerank are more likely to get "hijacked".
Recently, Google's AdSense pages made headlines for cloaking - something they rectified by temporarily imposing sanctions upon the AdSense pages.
It seems to me that the resulting low pagerank for the AdSense pages would quite easily account for the fact that they got "hijacked".
So basically, Google did something many people (a.k.a. whiny morons) thought was "spammy", they subjected themselves to the same sort of punishment they dole out to "spammy" pages to shut up the whiners, and, as a result, they ended up having the same minor bug that affects "spammy" pages affect their own pages.
Big deal.
It is a hijack. What he is refering to is that he isn't a hijacker since he isn't profiting off the link. He using the common 301 redirect hijack that has plague google for a while. If you view the cache of his website, you'll see that googlebot is getting a different page than normal users. Googlebot is getting a 301 to adwords. The inbound(trust) links are credited towards the hijacking site as seen here. If you check the first result, you'll notice no link to the hijackers page yet is credited as an inbound link.
Have you ever been to a turkish prison?
Two weeks ago if you searched for "google" on www.google.com, the first result that you got was https://desktop.google.com which redirects to the google home page. Google desktop seemed to have hijacked the google search homepage!
Of course, the slashdot editors rejected the story.
Google needs to adjust their canonicalization algorithm so that a page the redirects is not chosen as the canonical url.
According to a post under TFA by the owner of the site, he didn't do this on purpose.
Long live the Speaker Bracelet
Rolo D. Monkey
As someone who's written books with actual URLs on the printed page, I can understand his desire to have some way to update stale links without having to track down and change every copy. Automatically redirecting is not a big deal -- this is how TinyURL and other similar (and useful) services work. Most of the printed links in my new book (see below) are done in this way to keep them from breaking when the destination site changes things around and they don't bother to redirect incoming links to the correct location.
There is a difference between "redirecting" and "hijacking". Redirection by itself is not hijacking.
EricBuy your dad this book for Father's Day
Just to clarify that a bit -- 301 redirects are not a hijack. They just mean that a resource is 'moved permanently' and search engines will change their databases to point to the new location. I have done this with two paths on my own website here at work and in time Google picked up on the redirections and cleaned its database. It's also useful because this way visitors who got to the site by clicking on old links don't get 404 errors and lose interest -- they just get redirected to the correct page. (It's implemented as ModRewrite instructions in the htaccess file for the site).
... I couldn't verify anything in that blog post. None of the tests listed to reproduce what is described worked -- no hijacks are apparent anywhere, or even the guy's site, in the search results..
It's only a hijack if you're specifically targeting search bots with customized pages and doing sneaky things that way. Which this guy might or might not be doing
i am a soviet space shuttle
Check the pagerank of this site and take a wild guess whom they hijacked...
From reading the responses here and from the last time this topic surfaced on slashdot, it seems as though people don't fully comprehend the crappiness of the problem.
I run a game programming website as a hobby, so my livelihood doesn't depend on google's ranks. But my page rank has descreased and I have fewer back links as reported by google. The links to my site and it's content have not decreased, but google's reporting says it has.
This is simply the effect where the cause is some casino website that does this damn 301 redirect to my website. I had a leeching problem for a while, so I analyed my web server logs to find out the culprit, in doing so I found some odd web log spam for some website in china and a casino website doing a redirect and theft of my site's content.
I don't make any money off my website, it's a very small niche, but the content is good and it had a nice page rank for a while, so it was an easy target. And there really isn't much I can do. My site got hijacked, google indexed the hijacking page as though it was mine, then they change their page after being indexed in google so that now display advertisements instead of doing the redirect.
As a hobbyist, I can't get into litigation with a damn casino website in a different country. I know a lot of complaints are from the so-called "search engine optimizing" companies, but as an honest webmaster with no comercial interest in google, it's still a pain in the butt. There is absolutely nothing honest webmasters can do to prevent this or to rectify it. The ball is in Google's court to give credit where credit is due, and that's the final target URL, not the referer.