Are Your High Page Rankings Getting STOLEN??
As if spammers sending junk to your inbox wasn't irritating enough, now they can add spam to your website—without you even knowing.
This new brand of spam is targeting websites that have built up high rankings on Google, into which spammers insert their own keyword-rich links and redirects to their own websites thus STEELING YOUR HIGH RANKINGS!...and they can do it without your knowledge. If this happens to your website when your users click on these links they are immediately redirected to the website of the spammers' choice.
If cloaked web site spamming wasn't offensive enough in nature to rattle your sensibilities—these links redirect your users to what are usually black hat, corny and scamming websites, sites that can damage the high Google ranking that you have worked so hard to build.
Different ways Hijackers and Hackers get in:
- Hijacking with an ID Redirect (or a 302 redirect): This is when a Hijacker manages to get his script listed as the official URL for someone elses web page making the script point to the other webmaster’s page.
- Hijacking with Meta Refresh: This is when the URL will look innocent enough but within the code of your page the Hijacker inserts some code using a meta refresh script that will make your page redirect to theirs.
To see if a site is using a Meta Refresh, view the code by clicking on view/source in your browser menu and see if there are any meta refresh tags in the code at the top of that page. Look for a meta redirect tag set for "0" seconds, that is redirecting to your site, similar to the following: meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0"; url=http://www.YourOwnDomainNameHere
- Hijacking with a Server Side 302 Redirect in .htaccess: A hijacker may also set up 302 Redirects in their web sites .htaccess file telling the server to redirect to your site. 302 redirects tell the search engines their page has moved temporarily to your site and to credit the content of your site to their site and thus stealing your high page rank.
There are many other ways to get Hijacked but those tend to be the most popular ways ...
Have I Been Hacked or Hijacked?
Luckily there are ways to tell if your website has been hijacked by cloaked spammers (they sound like super villians from a comic book, no?). There are a couple ways to check for hijackers, and luckily both of them are relatively simple:
Check Google
Enter this phrase into Google Search ' site:yourdomain.com' but replace yourdomain.com with your website's URL. It will return results for all the pages indexed on your site and you will need to browse through them, checking the title and descriptions to ensure they are all your pages and not the pages of The Cloaked Spammer. Click on the listings to ensure that visitors are indeed directed to the pages on your site, and not redirected elsewhere.
Google Web Master Tools: A free service from Google, the Google Web Master Tools will tell you if anything is wrong within your web site pages.
Once you have checked if you have any hijackers on your site, you will need to correct any redirects made by hackers who penetrated your site, and after that you will want to ensure that you have up-to-date security software (with all the most recent updates) for your content management system—ensuring this won't happen again.
Click here to learn more about web site Hackers and how to prevent against an attack!
