Return of the ‘jack? Google and 302’s revisited
*UPDATE* Sadly, the links I was pointing to in this post are gone, so I’ve removed the anchors. If you don’t know who Jason is, or what 302 ‘jacking is, this post therefore makes no sense. Sorry about that
Jason has a slightly brain-bending post on the re-occurence of an SE issue that seemed to have been put to bed - the302 hijack. It’s not for the faint-hearted, but it’s an interesting read if you can keep your brain from melting.
Essentially, the way Google treats cross-domain 302 redirects is to start a “competition” between all the URLs “competing” for the same content, and selects the most (in their view) authoritative. Even if that’s not the original page, the new winner gets credited with the ranking, and the traffic etc that goes with it.
It’s obviously most useful for picking off low-value long tail pages, but if you can grab thousands of them, it could take the owner of the original site quite a while to work out whats going on.
Nice work, Jason
Jason’s post made me yell “Yeah Toast!”
My head still hurts, but he has a very good way of accurately making it understandable
Comment by Mark Laymon — February 15, 2007 @ 12:42 am
302 redirects is still confusing for some people!
Comment by Julie — July 3, 2007 @ 12:24 pm