Beware Of Google Hijacking

Brian Livingston recently addressed the security issue of complete hijacking of your Web site traffic in an article. Here are a couple of excerpts.

“If you come to work one morning and find that your company’s traffic from Google has fallen to nothing, a competitor may be redirecting traffic from your site to his. Amazingly, there may be little or nothing you can do to stop this blatant rip-off.

The cause is an obscure HTML command that is interpreted poorly by Google but correctly by Yahoo and some other search engines. Knowing about the trick at least gives you some hope of understanding it — if it happens to you.”

Livingston goes on to say “Yahoo’s solution seems eminently reasonable and workable to me. Rather than experimenting with complex rules to analyze URL hijacking, Google and other search engines should simply adopt the rational 301/302 policy shown above. This problem shouldn’t exist and need not exist. Finding out that your site has suddenly lost most of its traffic because of an HTML trick is a lousy way to start the day.”