Sumo Consulting^2.0

It all started with reading this thread on Slashdot about Google Hijacking. For those just tuning in, here's a summary of what Google Jacking is from clsc.net's article on it:

"An explanation of the page hijack exploit using 302 server redirects. This exploit allows any webmaster to have his own "virtual pages" rank for terms that pages belonging to another webmaster used to rank for. Successfully employed, this technique will allow the offending webmaster ("the hijacker") to displace the pages of the "target" in the Search Engine Results Pages ("SERPS"), and hence (a) cause search engine traffic to the target website to vanish, and/or (b) further redirect traffic to any other page of choice."

Here's what happens (credit mla_anderson on the Slashdot thread):

1. Googlebot goes to scammer's site
2. Googlebot is given a 302 (redirect) to the victim's site
3. Googlebot indexes the victim's site as belonging to the original URL
4. Googlebot goes to the victim's site
5. Googlebot realizes this URL is already indexed and "belongs" (according to the Google code) to the scammer.
6. The victim's site get's lower rankings as the page is not even indexed, the scammer's site gets a higher ranking.
7. The spammer removes the 302 and replaces the page with a spammy page of their own choosing, advertizing porn, viagra, whatever. (added at 12:00 PST)

A more detailed listing of how it works can be found in this comment.

If you have a Macromedia Centric blog picked up by an aggrigator and want to test if your blog has been Google Jacked, type the following into Google:

allinurl:yourdomain.com

If some of the search results include pages containing the exact content and title as your blog, yet have a different domain, you've been Google Jacked. Admittedly, and per the descriptions in the above linked paged, this could be by accident some of the time, but the biggest offender in this case for me is edelina.com. Go ahead, type that domain into your browser (I'm not giving them any more link visibility by linking to them). It's a craptastic cornucopia of spammy junk, and they have a 302 redirect up an entire family of Macromedia centric blogs. I've checked others, and we are virtually all there as far as I can tell.

Google Hijacking is worse than someone simply syndicating your blog content on their site because it's actually faking our Google to think that it *is* your site vie 302 redirects, which mean "temporarily moved" as opposed to 301 which mean "permanently moved".

After a little more investigation, I found that the DNS host for edelina.com is Abadon Studios based out of Aliso Viejo CA. Searching for "Abadon Studios" in Google also reveals that they have a metric ton of other craptastic ethically questionable SEO domains. for all sorts of things.

The worst part of it is that the slimeball behind all of this seems to be using Fusebox, which means he's "one of us".

If you are effected by this, instructions on what to do about it can be found posted by GoogleGuy on the Slashdot thread. It boils down to contacting Google's user support and using the word "canonicalpage" in the complaint.

I would encourage anyone with an effected blog to make a complaint.

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