302 hoax?

Anyone shed any light on this?

http://www.netbizcity.com/302_hoax.htm

Any truth in it?

 

NO, imho the majority of the report is BS.
302's can and do cause very odd things to happen

bollox. The url the SE's bring back is the one that it goes to. There's more than one way to do a 302 redirect - meta refresh for one.
Run a search for www.crazygeek.co.uk and take a look at what url is returned - it's not mine, it's the url of a link which uses a 302 redirect .

How the hell can you hijack a site with a direct link.

imo this reads as someone the person who wrote it had a lot of outgoing 302 links and just got slammed by every SEO in the business.

 

The author, whoever that might be becuase it is not signed, makes statements and fails to back them up with technical reasons.

Many of the statements are only partly true. And, I get the impression that the author does not really understand spiders.

A spider follows a link, and does not challenge ownership of the page that loads unless additional code is created specifically for that purpose.

That code would be the 'fix'.

 

Right you are.

But I was convinced that it was fixed in the 'Superbowl Update' in early February until I ran a search on Google for your url.
Until someone pointed out to me it would not work, I thought a block-by-referrer would. But search engine crawlers do not have referrers. I don't think there is a thing you can do on your own site, server, etc. Building incoming links seems to have no effect, but don't quit.

And if you stop the redirect on geeklog going to crazygeek, you will see crazygeek's PR3 is attributed to the redirect page.

And yep, this is a spammer that got burnt. netbizcity.com runs on cw3host.net and I saw the 302's they were running. When you do a lookup for cw3host.net, you get:

Administrative Contact:
gabriele, vincent
cw3 web hosting
151-05 82nd St.
Howard Beach, New York 11414
United States
7188354370
Technical Contact:
gabriele, vincent
cw3 web hosting
151-05 82nd St.
Howard Beach, New York 11414
United States
7188354370

I feel for ya, jlawrence. You should request the link on gldir.com be dropped. I was hurt by a redirect scheme for over year, with sporadic problems before that. How are your rankings? Are they affected?

Here's a good post on the subject:
http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum3/25638-39-10.htm
Note the age.
Another:
http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum30/29391.htm
Started a week ago. Google is hitting itself.

What I find funny is that gldir.com, the directory of sites using geeklog, is stealing the PR8 off of geeklog.net, the script site itself. This link:
h ttp:// www.gldir.com/linkportal/20010719095147683.php
is on the bottom of every page of gldir.com. You'd think they'd figure it out...

 

Further question, are 302's still a issue? I asked a lady of a site to remove a link to us that's a 302. She point blank refuses!

Claiming that it's all twaddle...

Any proof that it is a issue? (Excluding the domain search someone has already posted)

Any PR from google? (Press release not page rank : )

 

What I don't understand about this issue... Lots of smoke and mirrors out there already, I know. But I thought I'd drop this spanner into the works anyway

The yahoo! directory uses a 302 redirect - Is everyone paying for the privilege of being hi-jacked by Yahoo!?

I've just run the rexswain.com header checker on

http://rds.yahoo.com/S=2818585:D1/C...8ch5rnb/*http://www.0-60-car-insurance.co.uk/

It's returning a 302...

I'm still advising people to submit to it - should I not be???

 

TFMG, yes, it probably is still an issue. I know that before, it took a higher PR domain to cause problems, however. This one I do not know yet, as we are looking at crazygeek.co.uk in what seems to be the early phase. Many hosts do understand the problem, point the linker to this thread and the url's for forums I posted above, and if she still refuses, appeal to her providers. Many hosts were caught in this trap.

Note the cache for the search on ht tp://www.crazygeek.co.uk/
http://64.233.187.104/search?q=cach...r.com/linkportal/20050129035619105.php+&hl=en
It is showing crazygeek's page under a gldir.com url. Since Google says they use a cached page to rank, I would say he is in trouble.

Look at these two results:
http://www.google.com/search?q=link:j8d-xUbJZyQJ:www.gldir.com/linkportal/20050129035619105.php
(again from the search for crazygeek)
http://www.google.com/search?q=link:www.crazygeek.co.uk
(direct search on Google)

This tells me that Google is ready to attribute crazygeek's links, even his own internal links, to gldir.com.
Google isn't coming out on this issue. They know they are harming the serps at this point.

Dangermouse:
Google has a problem, and a few other less significant search engines do as well. But they do not follow Yahoo's links. However, in the trap I was caught in, several sites scraped the results from Yahoo and MSN where I still ranked well. As I managed to get one link shut off, another would take the position. Every time Google updated, I could see my url come and go only to be replaced by a scraper site shortly thereafter. It showed my site at #8 at one point, I hit refresh once, and it was replaced right before my eyes.

It makes you wonder if Google really likes blogs or just can't help itself.

 

I wondered whatever happened with regards to that attempt. Now I know, thanks.

 

The problem here is that the redirect page has a link to gldir.com on it. The redirect page has PR. crazygeek.co.uk currently is grayed. If the redirect is left alone, the results here:
http://www.google.com/search?q="closed+directory+project"&&filter=0
(note to search with quotes)
should eventually dump crazygeek.co.uk in favor of gldir.com since the real pagerank of gldir.com is larger than what crazygeek.co.uk should have. This is probably due to the duplicate content filter.

As long as that redirect page exists, crazygeek.co.uk won't rank. Track the words with and without quotes. Eventually to hide what we see now, Google will assign the serp position rank to the page the link to the redirect page is on.

Even if you give crazygeek.co.uk a really good static anchor link with the text of Closed Directory Project, and the problem is still happening, it won't matter.

If the problem still exists, that is. What I see may be cleaned up by Google at some point. What we see may be some kind of flux.

The earliest problems I had were similar, it would show the url within a directory for the redirect page on another site for my keywords, but my description, and the clickthrough went to me. But the keywords were stripped, logs showed the directory as a referrer. The directory owner figured it out, and took the directory down. The method was used in the ultramarine negritude contest by some. Soon, sites using dmoz, results from the big three searches, and more with redirect schemes popped up. Google at some point decided to attribute the ranking to the page the redirect link was on, if the pagerank of the domain was higher, giving the page a higher rank.

The ones that gave me the most problems had Google ads, links within the site to articles, usually some safer redirect or a direct link to the host running the site, and the top 10 or so site listings from Yahoo or MSN search set as a redirect. Bigger problems the higher up you were. Being number one was a deathblow. Google seemed to be penalizing the sites, and many were trying to find out why in vain.

I'll look around in the gldir.com directory, there may be a site that this has already happened to or maybe more in the same shape. Perhaps in gldir.com's 50 newest?

 

To say that crazygeek won't rank isn't quite true.
The homepage won't rank - but does that really matter.
In my case, no it doesn't. Not really.
The way the geeklog cms works - at least the way I've configured that site. Is that the homepage provides a front end to the various topics. The topics themselves still rank.
So a 302 (in this case) hasn't killed the entire domain.
Crazygeek is really just my place for playing around - now and again it does get some seriously good click through (with some very nice priced clicks >$3)- oneday I might get around to making it into something more serious.
What I'm doing now, is getting a serious amount of links into that domain - adding between anywhere from 5 to 50 per day.
The domain is PR3 (genuine) the gldir is PR4 - or at least the link page was before it hijacked my homepage .
I'm wondering, if I increase the PR of my domain drastically, will it capture back what shows in the search for the domain name. It'll be interesting to find out. If anyone fancy's linking to the domain, just for this experiment, then feel free to pick a page and anchor.
I have asked for the link to be removed, but I'm not really bothered about pushing it at this stage.
If after the next PR update, I've not got the search showing what it should. Then I'll be having words with their hosting provider (I'm not getting any joy from the domain holder).

I also have another site which is linked to from the gldir - that site has a homepage PR2 internal PR5. Everything is still showing correctly in searches for that site. Odd, isn't it - there seems to be no rhyme nor reason as to what one of these 302's will do.

 

NetMidWest: from here crazygeek isn't grey'd, it's still showing PR3
If it was grey'd, I might be a little more urgent in doing something about it - rather than just experimenting to see what (if) anything I can do without getting it removed from the gldir.

 

Should gldir.com get your ranking for your homepage, your topics will probably drop like a rock.

I gave you a link for 'Closed Directory Project' on my main directory page (see sig). I would have given it to you on the directory links page, but it seems to be having problems that I am still analyzing.

Someone else give him a link too, just in case my problem is similar and it spreads through my site, making my link worthless.

 

I do hope for your sake and others that this is some kind of flux. When did you submit to gldir.com? I agree, if it is not important financially, check out the problem. This does not seem to be malicious, but a look at allinurl:gldir.com is very interesting... all those subdomains. Seem to be affiliate links and internals, for now.

I show a gray google toolbar pr, but http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/pagerank-search/ shows you have 3. I show PR for everything as expected for all other sites I have visited today. Anyone else in the states, specifically midwest, showing similar results? MoPacFan?

 

I think the site's been in the gldir for about 6 months.
I'm pretty certain it's not malicious. The gldir is built around an old version of Geeklog, the newer versions use 301 redirects for linking - completely different to the old version. Time they updated, I'm pretty sure there were security issues with the version they're running - suppose I ought to look further into those, just incase.
As far as I'm aware, the homepage doesn't rank for any keywords - at least not that I know of.
The only page that ranks even any where interestingly is for 'basic asterisk configuration' #11 and 'basic asterisk' #23. Both point to internal pages.
I know the domain has a couple of PR5's and a couple of PR4's pointing at it at present + various others. Be interesting to see how many IBL's showup at the next BL update ( I know I've personally added well over 100 in the last 2 weeks).

 

I don't know if I found a full-on problem or not, but interesting...

http://www.google.com/search?q=Ruaraidh's+Site
http://www.google.com/search?&q=allintext:Ruaraidh's+Site

and without the apostrophe-s
http://www.google.com/search?q=Ruaraidh+Site
http://www.google.com/search?q=allintext:Ruaraidh+Site

Note that geeklog and gldir both link with the apostrophe-s

 

Just to answer my own question

I've found 'proof' on webmasterworld.

http://googleguy.zorgloob.com/

'Googleguy' has a @google.com email address which he does answer questions on (if you're lucky : ) so he really does work for google.

Also I met him at the WMW conference in Florida.

 

Netbizcity is not a Spammer the got burnt
I run it and you my friend are just the type that hypes the hoax
You want to be the man - but you are not a programmer and do not know what you are talking about.
Netbizcity is a information website to learn how to promote your website.
It does no mailings other than a email to those that use our free service on httpsend.com when they submit.
None of my websites spam - my viewpoint is based on solid research - what's yours based on?

Vincent Gabriele

 

vincentq: who are you directing that to ?
If it's aimed at me, then you're talking crap.
a) yes I am a programmer - and have worked on quite a few blue chip website backends.
b) my view is based simply on the fact that crazygeek is one of my test sites. Run the searches shown in this thread, you'll see a url that's not mine as the result.
c) I never said you were a spammer - 302 redirecting isn't spam.
d) since I've got a google engineer looking into this, I'd say that your 'solid' research is wrong.

please learn how http works. If an SE hits a jump.cgi, and that returns any redirect code (ie 301 or 302) then it takes the appropriate action based on what it's told. It will see the URL doing the redirecting and it will see the site that it's being redirected to, whether it associates the webiste with the url doing the redirection depends on the code returned.
You might well be a programmer yourself, but it appears you need to learn how bots work and how the protocol itself works. You don't need to know how the google algos work to understand how bots work - they visit a page, make a list of links and follow them, what happens when they load a page is that they take action depending on what the protocol tells them to.


If this wasn't a problem the google wouldn't be looking into it. I can't give you more proof than that.

 

You are right, Netbizcity isn't. I cannot say that any of your sites send out email spam.

But I wasn't talking about email spam... I was talking about search engine spam. Many have used the 302 redirect method innocently, but once they are aware of the problem and leave it up, or create directories of their competitors to exploit the problem, they are in my opinion, spamming Google for rank.

IF you found it important enough to actually research, you gave it some credibility at one time. I don't think you took into account the pagerank battle, because the directory I saw couldn't beat those already existing and was not used in the same manner as others. The site with the redirects has to have the higher PR to win, and the first site listed with a redirect link on a page is the most affected. Most dumped anything they knew they could not beat to improve the page's rank stealing ability. The text used for the link mattered as well. I could not rank for certain phrases containing 'web hosting' because they all used it. For the same phrases with the keyword 'hosting' and excluding 'web', there was some rank, but not as expected.

I would like to hear your proof for this being a hoax.

Your insistance that 302 redirect problems are a hoax is the only full on statement I have heard yet saying it does not exist. I have had many show disbelief, but I have almost always found an example to convince them, as I did in this thread. With research, most do see that it is a problem, although they disagree as to the extent and importance of the problem.

The majority of these sites were hammered in February this year. Some decided to go with javalinks, convinced of PR leak, I guess. Long lists of your competitors with keyword rich descriptions make great AdSense fodder, but without the redirect driving PR, those pages are near worthless now. The biggest problem I had was owned by another host, used a throwaway, reregistered domain with existing PR, and was hosted on a box with a home cable connection in the US and later in Canada. I got them shut down at least once because of the use of a home connection to run a server. I know they moved it at least twice.

I saw it start accidentally over two years ago. I kept my mouth shut because I understood the implications, except to point it out to Google. Originally, it would show a site with the redirect URL in the serps. It still went to the site, so not so bad. The content still ranked, but toolbar PR was missing, and it looked like hell to have the redirect link there. When backlinks started getting attributed wrong, Google changed the way they attributed the PR, back to the page with the 302 link on it, making the problem worse. Eventually, I saw it get used purposefully. Some would call it good SEO. If you have to harm another to get what you want, it is not good. I think Google went easy when it did not permanently ban the sites that were obviously using it to steal PR and rankings.

But I do consider Google at fault, since I (and surely others) pointed it out to them early on. They had a chance to fix it, but they were of the same mindset as you. They did not wish to believe Google could get gamed. They are now painfully aware.

Some major scripts that had add-on modules for directories that cause the problem changed the scripts radically. They saw what was happening, and would not have gone through the trouble if it were not real.

Shakespeare said it best...
Me thinks she doth protest too much...