Page Hijacking

PAGE HIJACKING

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Introduction:

Page Hijacking is a form of search engine index spamming. It is done by creating a rogue copy of a popular website which shows contents that is similar to the original web crawler; but it redirects the web surfers to unrelated or malicious websites.

Why Page Hijacking is done?

Page Hijacking is done in order
1.To achieve high rankings in resultant pages for certain keywords.
2.To boost their websites and its ranking by diverting the traffic to their websites and earn business.
This redirection will sometimes lead to MFA sites created by spammers through which they generate more revenue and in turn this redirection annoys the web users and spoils the reputation of a good genuine website and deprives them of their clients and viewers.A malicious website when loaded can hamper the user's system by uploading certain virus and damaging viewer's computer. This is done for fun reasons.

Page Hijacking- a form of Cloaking

Page Hijacking is an illegal way of search engine optimization performed by spammers and hackers to regulate traffic to their page. To put it in layman's words "Page Hijacking is a form of cloaking." Web crawlers employed by search engines to index websites does not have the characteristic feature to identify duplicates while indexing web pages. , if it is able to find two web pages of similar contents, it indexes only one URL among them.
Spammer or a hacker takes this as an advantage and will make sure that the rogue copy or the cloaked copy is the one that is being indexed and shown among the result sets of search engines for a particular keyword or a phrase.

Pagejacking and Issues faced by several webmasters, SEO's and Web developing companies:

Several companies providing similar services and products often hire spammers and hackers to do Pagejacking in order to defeat their opponents and raise their profits in an illegal manner. The consequences are quite bewildering and obnoxious to many SEO's, Website owners and other web related companies. Some are.

Every search engine follows algorithms that ranks a particular webpage based upon the traffic derived by it. These algorithms do not have the tendency to identify malicious websites deriving traffic in an illegal way. As a result these malicious websites derive traffic illegally and will get ranked higher than the genuine websites.

Fall down of genuine websites

Genuine websites falls down behind these other websites which derive traffic illegally and gets ranked higher than genuine websites. Thus organizations which have genuine websites lose its business in the process.SEO's and other website owners find it highly manipulative and unfair as it deprives them of their business as their website's rankings fall below par. All their efforts goes down the drain as their websites lose the opportunity to be listed among the top 10 result sets irrespective of their legal search engine optimization strategies.Because of page hijacking concept the web owners of the original URL's are tremendously affected as their website is not being indexed or listed at all and they follow search engine submissions again and again. Continuous search engine submissions are viewed by search engines as a spammer activity and they end up banning that particular website. Thus the genuine website owner loses his/her website itself in the process.

The 301 Redirect, The perfect Solution?

The 301 Redirect basically instructs the search engine spider to maintain the requested resource but neglect all redirect URLs to the main resource page. This means the main URI, (the first one requested) will get indexed by the search engine spiders and not the temporary URI. In fact, if you do this properly, you would never have to worry about "hijacking". Web owners should make use of Check Server Header Tool to determine how the URL is being treated by the server. It also helps you to identify any redirects if such an act is taking place.

Are you Pagejacking?

Pagejacking is another term for Page Hijacking. This is nothing but stealing high ranking page contents and publishing them on your website with minor changes or alterations.

Pagejacking is unethical and illegal and the consequences are quite severe. If such practices are found in your website, it is certainly bound to be banned. This is combined with cloaking concept to hide the victimized site's contents from search engines and its users.
For example auto-blogs are completely pagejacked contents taken from RSS Feeds.