Everything you ever wanted to know about Google’s 302 *issue* is now on one handy page. Danny Sullivan has compiled a killer list of resources in regards to Google’s 302 problem, check it out here:

Google’s Redirect Hijacking Problem Gets Slashdotted

The key thing is that the situation seems to really only impact you if someone does a redirect from a URL with a higher PageRank score than the target page. But that can be done, and the situation has long been a worry to some webmasters.

Slashdot has picked up the cause here:

Google 302 Exploit Knocks Sites Out

The exploit: Redirect via 302 to another page of your choice, then watch as the URL of your your redirect script replaces the URL of that carefully selected page in Google’s search results. Once this happens, feel free to redirect any visitor that is not Googlebot to any other page of your choice. Also applies to other search engines as well (not Yahoo! though).”

The basic issue is that not only can purposeful individuals kick you out of the serps with a simple 302 from a higher pagerank page, but people who use 302 redirects to track outgoing links from their site (and several content management software packages do this by default) can accidently do the same thing and there isn’t anything the real webmaster can do about it.

More Links:

Page Hijack: The 302 Exploit, Redirects and Google

Your Site Is At Risk From Hijackers (Currently 59 pages - One of many WMW threads)

I have two websites currently including outside scripted links when I do a site:mydomain.com on Google, but I don’t think that’s the reason why they can’t be found in Google. Small amount of pages (less than 50ish for both), and probably over-optimised is the real culprit.

As far as I know - I haven’t hurt anyone. I do use click tracking scripts for many of my affiliate links, but I don’t seem to have caused a problem for those sites. Probably because my pages are never that high in PR (4 is the highest) and I pretty much use the click trackers for affiliate links only, not using them at all to link to other websites or link exchanges, etc.

I think because this issue has been steadily gaining exposure and more and more hijacking victims are stepping forward, and more and more people are learning about this method of hijacking, Google will clean this up.

They have no choice.

Imagine what Google will be like 6 months from now - everyone knows how to hijack their competitors on Google, and it’s easy enough for the very newbiest of newbies to pull it off. Google has to fix this.