Reports of More Google Hijacks via Proxy Sites

In late 2004 and early 2005, page hijacks were a huge concern with Google. Back then, sites used a 302 redirect to take over a susceptible page within the search results.

Marcia reports at Search Engine Watch Forums that the hijacks are still an issue.

I found this just this week when doing an inurl: search for one of my domains, and it's the OTHER site that shows up instead of my homepage. A search for that site by name has always brought the site up - but no more, it's nowhere to be found.

One domain causing it to happen has over 50K hijacked pages duplicated and in the index on their domain, and another has many, many thousands and is running Adsense. They're both anonymous proxies.

DaveN concurs that he has been seeing these proxy sites; "I have seen anonproxy sites rotating IP address, and cloaking the real one that google gets..."

There are not many examples showing this in the thread so it is hard to pinpoint for you guys. But there are respected SEOs discussing the issue.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Update: WebmasterWorld also has a thread on this topic. The post shares a lot more information, so I will quote most of it.

Over the weekend my index page and now some internal pages were proxy hijacked within Google's results. My well ranked index page dropped from the results and has no title, description or cache. A search for "My Company Name" brings up (now two) listings of the malicious proxy at the top of the results.

The URL of the proxy is formatted as such:
https://www.scumbagproxy.com/cgi-bin/nph-ssl.cgi/000100A/http/www.mysite.com

A quick search in Google for "cgi-bin/nph-ssl.cgi/000100A/" brings up now 55,000+ results when Saturday it was 13,000 and Sunday it was 30,000. The number of sites affected are increasing exponentially and your site could be next.

Take preventative action now by doing the following...

1. Add this to all of your headers:
<base href="http://www.yoursite.com/" />

and if you see an attempted hijack...

2. Block the site via .htaccess:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} yourproblemproxy\.com

3. Block the IP address of the proxy
order allow,deny
deny from 11.22.33.44
allow from all

4. Do your research and file a spam report with Google.
http://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html