Succinct.. but more of the same stuff outlining the *problems* and a little light on solutions.
I've recently had this happen to me, I believe innocently, on a page that basically dropped from 1,000 views a day to zero. It's a reference page, and in fact the only banner on it is a "Get Firefox" one.
The "hijacker" is a PR4 blog, and my page is PR5. You'd think my page would win.. but it doesn't. The same blog has a number of outbound links, many to sites exhibiting the same problem.
Since it's noncommercial, and the site is the same as my screen name perhaps I can demonstrate with the actual page.
My page is
http://www.dynamoo.com/technical/phonetic.htm which should show in the top three in Google for a search of "phonetic alphabet".
The "hijacking" site is
here.. you can see a number of links under "Groovy Sites" with URLs starting "http://blog.halfacanuck.com/exit.." which all lead to a 302 redirect page which ONLY works if you click through from blog.halfacanuck.com.
Search in Google using
inurl: and my URL and Google *only* comes up with
http://blog.halfacanuck.com/exit/www...l/phonetic.htm
Click it.. and you get a 500 error. Worse, the page has displaced the original utterly - it's nowhere in the SERPs, even if you search for duplicates.
What's worrying in general about this is that a PR4 site has hijacked a PR5 page with 155 backlinks, including some pretty high ranking pages. This shows that it's perfectly possible for a relatively low-
PR site to have a good chance of hijacking a much higher
PR page.
What can I do? Well, there seems to be no technical solution to this problem - it's a bug with Google. So you're left writing to webmasters and hosts which is often a pretty fruitless experience.
In this case I'm trying to contact the webmaster, and I believe that I should be able to fix the problem.
However, I believe the problem gets *really* sticky when the "hijacker" doesn't respond to the request to remove this link. What can you do?
Well, you can try to give Google feedback through the inbuilt feedback tools but I suspect that the success rate here is pretty low..
So, you might look at putting some legal pressure on the "hijacker" but the question is: what have they done exactly? They haven't copied your site - they've basically put in a redirect on *their* site which is causing the problem. No scrap of your site is on theirs, and any sort of legal complaint is likely to get you nowhere, except possibly in trouble. Likewise, filing a DMCA complaint would be almost baseless.
There *is* a slim chance that this sort of hijacking might violate a host's AUP (acceptable use policy) but this would require a host sympathetic to your complaint. Similarly, you might have some leverage if there are trademarks involved.
There is a legal recourse in law though, but there's a catch. Hijacking pages in this way using redirects may well constitute a
tort which is essentially an action by another party that unfairly damages your business interests. (Some definitions
here ). You could well have a good case for filing a civil suit against the other party for damages in this case, but the catch is that this kind of legal action gets massively more difficult if the other party is in a different country. The
threat of this type of action may get the desired result, but you should *never* threaten any type of legal action that you are not prepared to follow up.
There's no magic bullet on this one. If it was just a site copier I could file a DMCA complaint in various places and remove the threat. But as it is, there's a small range of only partially effective solutions available to you.
The only real solution is for Google to fix the bug - so wherever it happens SEND FEEDBACK to Google (and the other impacted seach engines) through whatever mechanism is available. 10,000 different emails complaining about redirect hijacking might well get a response.
[Note: I
am not a lawyer. If in doubt seek professional legal advice.]
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