Mar
20
I’ve deliberated about whether to post this publicly, but it has to be done. Too many people are being hurt by all that’s been going on, and it simply isn’t fair to stay silent on these things. Most of the domain hijackings that have been posted about at the various SEO forums have involved 302 (Temporary) Redirects. This was found this weekend, and is, rather than a 302, done using Meta Refresh.
The site involved is now at #6 - parenthood.com and while the URL with the redirection is what shows in the search result, the content is that belonging to the site being linked to. Searching for a unique phrase in the page title we see that same situation in spot #1 at Google
Looking at a search for site: we can at this time see that there are at least 500 innocent sites (or pages) involved:
site:www.parenthood.com “+www.parenthood.+com/links_clickthru.html?”
Trying another search, at this moment if we do another search at Google
inurl:parenthood.com/links_clickthru.html -”www.parenthood.com
Then we can see 6,520 though as opposed to the first set, the ones I tried clicked through to the targeted sites.
Trying a search done another way
There are 1,180 pages brought up by the search. Clicking on one of them that is a complete listing with description on the search page - which links to within the parenthood.com site itself, we come to this page:
When we are redirected, we come not to the top of that page, but a spot toward the bottom of the page - and what do we find there but sponsored links. We’re also greeted by a popunder banner courtesy of www.undertonenetworks.com
That one was physically on the site; however, the ones that have a URL_only listing appear to arrive at the correct site when clicked on. BUT - we dont know how it’s actually affecting the Google listings of those sites unless we check them out.
Going a step further, if we click on the “more results” link - we get a different assortment
We can see 7,940 pages involved on the site.
There’s always the question of whether things like this are being done innocently, without the linking party being aware of the consequences to the sites linked to, or whether it’s done with deliberate intentions and full knowledge. We can only guess at intentions, until we go through any particular site and try to reason out what the motives and the extent of their knowledge are. For the most part, unless it’s glaringly obvious, as it sometimes is, we can only guess and hope for the best.