What to do when your site is hijacked?

September 24, 2007

Stumble it!

This can happen to anyone of you who is highly ranked in search engines. When you are an authority in a niche and you are well ranked in Google for this keyword then suddenly instead of you site being at the top you see that someone else is at the top and you site has gone…Then you are Hijacked!

This can be easy done with a 302 redirect and many webmasters are worried about this issue. Here are some webmaster experiences about this issue and how they get back their original rankings:

I recently went through the same issue, two weeks ago. My site is an authority site and a small domain decided to highjack us. Everything that you said happened to us; the hijacked site was ranking in place of our site. This happened on September 2nd on the 4th we filed a Google Spam report via webmaster tools. On September 10th Google dropped the hijacked site for the index. 7 days later which was yesterday Google brought my site back in SERPs and index.

I suggest that you file a Google Spam report and then wait. If your site has also been dropped from the index you will need to file a reinclusion as well and explain the situation, just wait for a few weeks and things should return to normal.

It really sucks when this happens also I would block the proxy site meantime and others. This seems to be an issue with Google from what I know. — Author: SEOold

Now I am sure that many webmasters ask questions about “How I can know if my site is hijacked” those are the following questions that have been asked as well:

Could you elaborate about how exactly did you find out that the offending site is “taking place” of your site and not simply rank higher after a routine algo change?

Did you watch SERPs for an important keyword, several keywords, your own domain name or something else?

Did your site completely drop out of the SERP (index?) or simply moved down? How far down?

SEOold, answered this:

We get hourly traffic reporting for my site which is broken by page type, ex. homepage, categories, products. We get about 7K clicks to the homepage and the day this happened our homepage traffic dipped to like 500. When checking for our traffic volume keywords (several of them) in Google SERPs we where no where to be found. Within the SERPs we saw our Title and Meta tags but for another domain. When we checked the site they basically had all our content and the URL looked like the following example.com/www.mysite.com. Our homepage was dropped from Google index as well due to duplicate content. Now to answer your second question the proxy site was ranking for all our terms that we were ranking for. Technically we were still ranking but they were getting the traffic.

Our homepage dropped immediately out of the index and SERPs. Our site pages will still performing fine as they were not affected.

We immediately filed a Spam Report. When researching the issue I was amazed to see how many people have had this issue and this is only an issue with Google.

Matt Cutts wrote and article about 302 redirects in January 2006. It is an interesting article: SEO advice: discussing 302 redirects

Want One of the Cheapest and Affordable Hosting?

What's Next?

 Subscribe To GoogleLady

 Digg It

 Save This Page

 Sphinn It

 Stumble it!

 Favorite This Post

 

Posted in Search Engines