Resources to Safeguard Your Website Against Search Engine Results Pages Hijackers

Operating a website involves many risks which can have devastating effects. Something similar happened to one of our customer's websites and we thought to publicise our research for primarily two reasons. One is to try to examine how to trace such "attacks" by malicious people and the other is to try to go through all the known and documented techniques several affected webmasters have deployed.

The 302 Hijaking Scum

This was a hot issue in 2006, primarily with Google, allowing a spammer to steal PR and rankings on SERPs. The spammer was linking to the innocent site via a 302 redirect script. It basically instructed the search engine robot (since the link is an internal url for the spammer's site) that one of his pages has moved over to the innocent site temporarily.

This fooled some search engines into thinking that the spammer's site is where the innocent site's content normally resides. You can read more information on this issue at the following links:

Google 302 Page Hijack is a primer on the issue, while Web Page Hijacking provides some good insight and links to more reading.

Ways to Protect Your Website Against Hijacking

Because of the nature of this problem, it is not possible to be 100% certain that one solution works or doesn't. Here is some simple advice which has helped the author's hijacked websites to regain rankings on the SERPs on the major search engines.

Base HREF Element - Adding a BASE HREF element on all your pages is probably the best way to avoid hijackings.

Use Absolure Instead of Relative URLS - Update all menu links on your site to show up in the HTML source as absolute urls. Example: "http://www.namesatnames.co.uk/domain-name-auctions.html" instead of "domain-name-auctions.html".