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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."
2. I for one welcome our new AdSense overlords
3. in soviet russia low quality websites hack YOU!
4. I host a low quality website You insensitive clod!(tm)
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine. My sig is my best friend. It is my life.
for those too lazy to RTFA, it appears google adsense wasn't exactly 'hijacked', but was victim of its own slightly buggy (at the moment) trust algorithms. from the comments there, it's apparantly only a real hijack if visitors get something other than a 301 as well in an attempt to divert their visit. here's what the 'hijacker' himself had to say on jensense.
"I want to thank JenSense and others for posting this thread. I just got off the phone with two different tech writers explaining why I would have a meta redirect on my site. It isn't an attempt to profit from either Google's page rank or some cloaked affiliate link. I am no hijacker. In fact, I'm not sure how I could in any way benefit from this link. The simple fact is this: I write and syndicate articles all over the web. I used to put into those articles direct links to sites I was talking about. A couple years ago I had a problem when I had written and syndicated several articles about GoTo.com when they changed their name to Overture. There were dozens of websites to notify and ask them to update the links in my articles. So I decided to begin using meta refresh redirects rather than listing the URL's directly. I can then keep the links current in all the articles I write. Hopefully Google will look at this and decide to make some changes so this won't occur. It's hard to believe I got a number 1 listing without trying."
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
This problem has been around awhile, and is part of the larger problem of search engines filtering out duplicate content. Great for the users, but it can be a real problem for site owners suffering from plagiarism or content theft. There's some information at the Copyscape plagiarism search service about what you can do about it.
Of *course* I light him on fire...how the hell else would I get the point across to him?! He has to learn to obliterate ads from my view, and conflagration is really the most effective tool at my disposal...if only I could have a piece of software that would do these things for me, I'd save a fuck ton on foxes...
"How like you to drag your keyboard to a gun fight." - Aaron Bedard (BANE)
Actually, Google AdSense already was at the very top of the page, even when it was "hijacked." Google puts its own sponsored links before the actual search results.
When I google too much bourbon, my senses get hijacked, too!
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
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.
Adolescent sniping is all well and good (this being Slashdot and all) but this should be a big deal to you even if you refuse to take the time to understand the specifics (RTFM).
/.) but now they themselves have been a victim of a '302 hijack'
Here's what's going on. Google has a flaw in their algorithm in the way it deals with 302 redirects. Instead of following the internet standard of following the 302 redirect to the new location and indexing that, Google sometimes applies the information, PageRank, and Google ranking position of the 302 destination page back to the page doing the redirecting.
This means that a third-party (usually a shady webmaster) can steal the ranking position of a competitor's site. The original site is usually removed entirely from the Google index further compounding the damage.
Google has repeated denied that this problem exists (here on
If Google can be hit by it - anybody can be hit by it. This is big enough to seriously f'up the Internet - get it?
What would they call him about? He did not actually do anything wrong.
He hasn't got any form of contract with google and he hasn't broke any laws...
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.
Point. I'd offer up some explanation about how I'm busy today or this, that and the other...but I really don't know how the hell I overlooked that...
I am shamed, now and forever more.
"How like you to drag your keyboard to a gun fight." - Aaron Bedard (BANE)
Yes, you too can shoot yourself in the foot.
I believe Bourbon is the name of this Google update. The slimy search engine optimizers (whose posts you can read if you click the link to webmaster world) name the updates of Google's index in order to keep track of them easier. If you read a little of the thread, I believe they refer to code words for past updates as well.
If the 302 page is just a redirect, why do they apply the redirectee's pagerank to the 302er's page, and not the other way around (apply the 302er's pagerank to the ridirected page)?
They don't. A PageRank is something that Google assigns to a URL rather than a page, based on how many pages containing the keyword links to it and some other stuff. The issue is that Google finds two URLs that lead to the same page, one is the page itself, and one is a 302 redirect.
Now when you search for a term and this page hits, Google doesn't want to display two links to the same page, so Google it has to decide which is the canonical address for the page. The way that it does this is simply to take the URL with the greater PageRank as the canonical URL, and returning that.
The issue is that this allows one, in theory, to hijack google entries by 302 to the page in question, and getting a higher pagerank for your URL then the real one. In this case the old URL will be suppressed, and Google will link to your URL instead. Once this is done, you can change your page to a phishing page or something, and get people.
Note, however, that if Google did not follow 302s, then this could still be done by simply proxying the actual page. If a request to my URL simply made the webserver fetch your page an return it, Google could never tell which was the real page, and which was the copy. It would have to return both (in which case I would be first if I had greater pagerank) or suppress one, and then they are back to the canonical problem.
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.