Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
SERP Hijacking/Content Theft/ 302 Redirect?
-
Sorry for the second post, thought this should have it's own.
Here is the problem I am facing amongst many others.
Let's take the search term "Air Jordan Release Dates 2017" and place it into Google Search. Here is a link:
https://www.google.com/#q=air+jordan+release+dates+2017Towards the bottom of the page, you will see a website that has SneakerFiles (my website) in the title. The exact title is: Air Jordan Release Dates 2016, 2017 | SneakerFiles - Osce
Now, this is my content, but not my website. For some reason, Google thinks this is my site. If you click on the link in search, it automatically redirects you to another page (maybe 302 redirect), but in the cache you can see it's mine:
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:qrVEUDE1t48J:www.osce.gob.pe/take_p_firm.asp%3F+&cd=8&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=usI have blocked the websites IP, disallowed my style.css to be used so it just shows a links without the style, still nothing.
I have submitted multiple google spam reports as well as feedback from search. At times, my page will return to the search but it gets replaced by this website.
I even filed a DMCA with Google, they declined it. I reached out to their Host and Domain register multiple times, never got a response.
The sad part about this, it's happening for other keywords, for example if you search "KD 9 Colorways", the first result is for my website but on another domain name (my website does rank 3rd for a different Tag page). The page I worked hard on keeping up to date.
I did notice this bit of javascript from the cloaked/hacked/serp hijacking website:
I disabled iFrames...(think this helps) so not sure how they are doing this.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Note: I am using Wordpress if that means anything.
-
I have done everything you listed with the exception of a firewall.
Will the firewall actually prevent this from happening or just make it a bit more difficult? Can something like this also be installed on the server end?
-
This is the 15th time this month.
Check the site to make sure that it is hacked reported to the owner and if they do not respond reported to Google
Get a WAF
https://sucuri.net/website-firewall/signup
or
You need to file a digital millennium takedown act
http://cognitiveseo.com/blog/7255/defend-against-serp-hijacking-before-you-lose-your-rankings/
DMCA use
http://www.whoishostingthis.com/resources/dmca/
https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/webmasters/h30z9W_1eGY
https://medium.com/@Juha.Sompinmaeki/google-search-results-hijacked-ae1e5933a5fe#.5unhmuvsz
-
I have seen this before, it looks like <a class="attribute-value">http://www.osce.gob.pe</a> has been hacked, but you have said that you have tried contacting them to tell them they have been hacked. Looks like they are only showing google your scrapped content but redirecting everyone else ( its a broken redirect for me), i'm guessing the hacked site has a higher authority than your site and that is why its out ranking you. This seems to be a common trick for these guys to make a quick buck for a few weeks before google catches on whats going on an corrects the serps.
Maybe try reporting it on googles forums, maybe a mod will escalate it for you.
Keep us updated
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Should I redirect or add content, to 47 Pages?
We have an insurance agency website with 47 pages that have duplicate/low content warnings. What's the best way to handle this? I'm I right in thinking I have 2 options? Either add new content or redirect the page? Thanks in advance 🙂
On-Page Optimization | | laurentjb1 -
Best practices for publishing sponsored content
Hello, Our website hosts sponsored content from different brands. Should we be listing the sponsor either on the frontend and/or through markup? - Would either way have any sort of an impact? The content itself is already clearly marked as 'sponsored content' but we were more interested in listing the specific sponsor. Also, we’re assuming the outbound links would need to be marked rel="sponsored" but are there any other best practices we should be implementing? Any insight would be appreciated.
On-Page Optimization | | Ben-R
Thank you in advance.
Best,0 -
Impact of keyword/keyphrases density on header/footer
Hi, It might be a stupid question but I prefer to clear things out if it's not a problem: Today I've seen a website where visitors are prompted no less than 5 times per page to "call [their] consultants".
On-Page Optimization | | GhillC
This appears twice on the header, once on the side bar (mouse over pop up), once in the body of most of the pages and once in the footer. So obviously, besides the body of the pages, it appears at least 4 times on every single pages as it's part of the website template. In the past, I never really wondered re the menu, the footer etc as it's usually not hammering the same stuff repeatedly everywhere. Anyway, I then had a look at their blog and, given the average length of their articles, the keyword density around these prompts is about 0.5% to 0.8% for each page. This is huge! So basically my question is as follow: is Google's algorithm smart enough to understand what this is and make abstraction of this "content" to focus on the body of the pages (probably simply focusing on the tags)? Or does it send wrong signals and confuse search engine more than anything else? Reading stuff such as this, I wonder how does it work when this is not navigational or links elements. Thanks,
G Note: I’m purposely not speaking about the UX which is obviously impacted by such a hammering process.0 -
Updating Old Content at Scale - Any Danger from a Google Penalty/Spam Perspective?
We've read a lot about the power of updating old content (making it more relevant for today, finding other ways to add value to it) and republishing (Here I mean changing the publish date from the original publish date to today's date - not publishing on other sites). I'm wondering if there is any danger of doing this at scale (designating a few months out of the year where we don't publish brand-new content but instead focus on taking our old blog posts, updating them, and changing the publish date - ~15 posts/month). We have a huge archive of old posts we believe we can add value to and publish anew to benefit our community/organic traffic visitors. It seems like we could add a lot of value to readers by doing this, but I'm a little worried this might somehow be seen by Google as manipulative/spammy/something that could otherwise get us in trouble. Does anyone have experience doing this or have thoughts on whether this might somehow be dangerous to do? Thanks Moz community!
On-Page Optimization | | paulz9990 -
Review markup not showing up in SERP anymore
Hi all, I have been collecting reviews for a little while now. Ofcourse im hoping to cross the 150 reviews border soon 🙂 But i also added the review markup to my website to show up in organic results. This was working fine for a while. I did not added the markup to my homepage. But now for somehow google is not showing this review markup anymore in search results. So i decided to give the company that is hosting the review tool (google partner also) a call. The informed me that they had a lot of calls and e-mails since 2 weeks from their customers. All with the same problem that review markup is not used in search results anymore. Anyone else had this, or know about this issue?
On-Page Optimization | | J05B0 -
Is it better to drip feed content?
Hi All, I've assembled a collection of 5 closely related articles each about 700 words for publishing by linking to them from on one of my pages and would appreciate some advice on the role out of these articles. Backround: My site is a listings based site and a majority of the content is published on my competitors sites too. This is because advertisers are aiming to spread there adverts wide with the hope of generating more responses. The page I'm targeting ranks 11th but I would like to link it to some new articles and guides to beef it up a bit. My main focus is to rank better for the page that links to these articles and as a result I write up an introduction to the article/guide which serves as my unique content. Question: Is it better to drip feed the new articles onto the site or would it be best to get as much unique content on as quickly as possible to increase the ratio of unique content vs. external duplicate content on the page that links to these articles**?** Thank you in advance.
On-Page Optimization | | Mulith0 -
Would it be bad to change the canonical URL to the most recent page that has duplicate content, or should we just 301 redirect to the new page?
Is it bad to change the canonical URL in the tag, meaning does it lose it's stats? If we add a new page that may have duplicate content, but we want that page to be indexed over the older pages, should we just change the canonical page or redirect from the original canonical page? Thanks so much! -Amy
On-Page Optimization | | MeghanPrudencio0 -
301 redirect (www.domain.com/index to www.domain.com)
Hello, Please let me know what are the exact right steps in order to get rid of the duplicate content issues related with: www.domain.com/index.html same as www.domain.com without creating an infinite loop. Do you have a step by step guide posted within seomoz including 301 redirect for non www to www for all urls and index.whatever to main domain name without going into a infinite loop ? btw how to you spot the loop ? is it obvious like never ending refresh of the home page ? thanks a lot !
On-Page Optimization | | eyepaq2