Aaron reported halfway april that 302 hijacking is back, and today, I came across the most horrible example I’ve seen in a while. Looking at this query (for obvious reasons), my eye was caught by the feedburner.name result in there. Since the title reflects another URL, I was already suspecting some nasty stuff…
It’s a nice domain, which makes full use of the power of 302 hijack and the domain name for the ranking of a search result page… Now if that isn’t spam, I ask you what is spam… This domain is linked from 1 page, www. logicdomains. nl, which links to a few hundred domains, all of them 302 redirected just like this one. There are some very nice domains and pretty competitive keywords in that list, and quite a few of those are actually ranking…
So, Matt posted on September 13th, 2005 “302 problems are hopefully much more rare“. They’re not anymore…
What a spam circus. This logicdomains.nl and all the 302′s on it should be spam reported.
Well spotted.
I personally don’t really believe spam reports are looked at enough :) I was hoping posting about this because they’re ranking for a Google brand might do the trick ;)
302 hijacking has never left. It is something search engines have always promoted unintentionally. It is just something that could be used for good and evil and search engines aren’t good at guessing intentions.
One of my clients insists on using it combined with cloaking (against my advice). He scores for somebody elses information in stead of them (they rank much lower), but the visitor sees my clients website when clicking the link. This is a nasty side-effect, that I hope will be fixed soon.
@Peter: yeah the stuff you can do with 302 hijacking are just out of this world… Combined with cloaking it’s a tool to rank for just about anything… I’d never before seen people “abuse” the power of domainnames in the Google algo like this though, especially not on this scale.
Spam. The problem will never stop on internet world.