December 1, 2004

Google denies 302 redirection problem

by brian_turner

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In August this year, the massive site business.com was penalised by Google. Acording to the article Why Business.com Was Banned, it was suggested that the problem lay in a specific use of redirects - and revealed a growing claim in the webmastering community that Google cannot properly process 302 redirects.

Since then, not only has it been claimed that Google cannot properly process 302 redirects, but more insiduously, it has been claimed that use of such redirects can be used to point to competitor websites - and see them completely removed from the Google index.

Now, at the Search Engine Watch forums, not only have some members complained that this practice of “domain jacking” continued regardless, but anothers has set up a real-time experiment, attempting to remove a target page from the Google index simply by pointing a 302 redirect from a source site.

The idea that websites cannot be penalised by who links to them has been an almost sacrosanct tenet of search engine practice - the intention being to prevent malicious linking to destroy other websites. Positive results in this experiment would therefore suggest a frightening proof - that you can destroy competitor search engine traffic in a relatively simple and malicious manner.

A Google representative, speaking unofficially, suggested that only one “concrete” example of a domain being hijacked in this manner had been proven to Google engineers. However, he urged the wider webmaster community to post any examples of “domain jacking” that they find to webmaster [at] google.com, with the keyword “canonicalpage” in the e-mail title, so that Google engineers can properly investigate whether there Google feels there is a real charge to answer.

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Story link: Google denies 302 redirection problem

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