Web page hijacking has been around for about a year now and is getting worse. Many other SEO blogs have reported that even Google itself has had its own page hijacked. This is ironic, since the hijacking problem is Google-related and the search giant has known about this problem, but has failed to address it.
There is even a movement within the SEO community to bang the drum so loudly that Google will be forced to address the issue. Since Google has become a big, publicly traded corporation, they have taken on the, “If no one’s making noise, then it must not be broken” stance. Well, there has been noise, but perhaps not enough noise. And like anybody else who doesn’t want to spend the time to fix something, they deny there is a problem.
But there is a problem. By simply building a blank HTML page and adding a meta refresh tag from site A to site B, with a zero second refresh rate, a Webmaster can trick Google into thinking the hijacked page is the original page. Why would someone want to hijack a page? For the Page Rank and the visitors. Spammers have found an easy method to skirt the real work and parasitically take what is not theirs.
SEO Dotcomicide has actually posted a screenshot of the hijacked Google page. A company called all-in-one-business.com has taken the top position in the rankings for the search term “adsense”. Most likely this was not a malicious trick, but a way to call attention that there is indeed a problem. Sometimes a problem is not a problem until it happens inside your own home.
