Got hijacked - killed my Adsense

This story is a little long so for those who have short attention spans be warned.

In a previous thread (see http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=29632) I was trying to figure out why I suddenly started getting foreign language ads on my site, which killed my Adsense earnings. The puzzle seems to be solved.

I was the victim of a 302 hijack. In this case it was a Russian website that hijacked me in the Google SERPs. I don't understand it, but there seems to be some interplay of the google-bot and media-bot. Here's what happened:

Adsense started serving me ads in Russian on September 20. Adsense support was very slow to respond (3 days to reply saying they would look into it), and then couldn't figure out why I was getting the ads in Russian. When I added new pages they would be served relevant English language ads for a short time and then Russian ads would appear.

After about two weeks of back and forth with Adsense support I stumbled on a cached version of my site that was in fact a Russian site. After I told support about it I started getting responses in 1 day instead of 3. They recrawled my site and since then when I ad new pages the ads are relevant and in English. However, all the old pages still get Russian ads.

Pure speculation on my part, but it seems like the media-bot would come around to a new page (which was in English) but then go check somewhere else (like maybe the cached SERPs) and decide Russian was the appropriate language to serve ads in. Now that the site was recrawled the media-bot correctly decides to serve English ads, but does not come to revisit the old pages and does not change the way it is serving Russian ads to those old pages.

It was costly. Not only did my site disappear from Googles SERPs, but my Adsense earnings immediately zeroed due to ads appearing in Russian. My understanding is that there is no defense against a 302 hijack.

 

Wow, that's an amazing story. I'd love to hear what AdsenseAdvisor has to say about that...

 

So would I, although whether or not we'll hear anything is another matter entirely...

 

did you pm her?

 

That is interesting.. We have always seen sites have a general theme that drives adsense ads for default, but interesting that it seems to pull straight from the serps.

 

Did you contact the other webmaster? Temporary redirects (refresh, etc.) are often overused, and hijacking can happen accidentally. See for example another probable case of 302 redirect hijacking:

 

I am also very interested in what ASA might have to say. When I emailed Adsense support to confirm that this was in fact the result of a 302 hijack they went silent. From what I have read this is a problem G is quite vulnerable to and so far has not remedied. Other SEs seem to have plugged the hole that allows these hijacks.

 

My site www.Arounddelhi.com had a simillar problem some time back though I was not using Adsense. My site index pages started showing cached pages of some unknown travel search engine. So my clients were going to this SE. I immediately sent a strong worded email to the webmaster warning him of dire consequences etc. The th;ing worked and my cached pages were pulled out. Any thing else you can do to guard against this infringement.
Anand

 

Oh , I never know they can do that , What about Google Adsense Team ?
What did they said about it

 

All Adsense support said was there was a problem crawling my site. When I pointed out it looked like a 302 hijack they went silent.

 

i don't know if i was a victim of this too. There are times that my site displayed ads which I couldn't read. it's like chinese or japanese.... i don'/t know

 

I am actually still kind of confused what this 302 hijack is and how this can happen.

How could i prevent this from happening?

 

From my understanding (which is very limited), a lot of these problems with ad serving would be solved if Google simply let webmasters have some control over which ads are shown on their websites.

I cannot believe an automated algorithm, I don't care how sophisticated, is more effective than the knowledge and experience of the webmaster.

 

Here is a good description of the 302 hijack.

clsc. net/research/google-302-page-hijack.htm

 

You seem to have pegged that one...

 

Is Google still officially denying their bugs in handling 302's?

I figured that their own AdSense page getting 302'd would have convinced them.

And I thought I was stubborn!

 

What I don't understand is what are you supposed to accomplish by performing a 302 hijack or than switching ads on a given site to another language? It doesn't seem to help you financially, but it can ruin someone else's adsense earning. I guess that is the point. The same reason people send viruses via email....because they can.

This sucks. Just one more thing to be worried about. And the way Google responds to it isn't comforting either.

 

I think Google is working to solve this. They only need time and reconsideration of factors.

 

Thanks gbh1935 very usefull information overthere...don't totally understand it but i get a small idea on this hijacking maddness because it is a maddness guys, this technique is going to be used more and more by scammers on the net for phishing techniques and so on.

But if i understand it correctly, you as the owner of the website can only get your pages hijacked if you yourself have a 302 redirect page in place for your domain, right?

So if i don't have a 302 page installed i am not vulnerable right?

 

No Edz, according to that article it is the web site of the hijacker who manipulates googlebot to view his site as yours by setting the 302 to work in a particular way ( either deliberate or accidently) at leat least in the serp link that people click on. It is also only in the search engine results that there is any form of manipulation of your site ( there is no loss of control of the domain itself )