Gmail 302 Hijacked…

Thanks to Jake Bohall, our Director of Sales, for noticing this due to a nasty Firefox 3.0 bug, requires that he type URLs into the Google Search App because the location bar no longer works.

It was years ago that the 302 hijack became a popularly abused method to steal rankings but, due to some apparant algo improvements and what I believe to be a well orchestrated misinformation campaign by either people who wanted to still abuse it or Google who didn’t have a good fix, the method seemed to disappear by-and-large.

However, the bug reared its ugly head again today, as Gmail.com itself was hijacked in Google.

As you can see, Gmail.com, or mail.google.com, are not ranking for the keyword gmail.com in Google. Instead, the ranking is replaced by a spam blog on blogspot.com

The tell-tale 302 hijack can be diagnosed by the cached page, which is of gmail.com

The perpetrator may have done this accidentally, however it appears that he did use spam-links to attempt to rank the site…

Good work Google! Lucky for Google, the owner of the blog has not replaced the content with something more malicious, like malware or a phishing site.

Update: It appears that Google has replaced the 302 redirect now with a 301 (they own blogspot.com) and, supposedly, shut down the infringing account. This should clean up the issue quickly, but represents little relief for webmasters who do not have control over the spammer’s site.Also, for people who have never heard of a 302 hijack, here is a nice primer: : It appears that Google has replaced the 302 redirect now with a 301 (they own blogspot.com) and, supposedly, shut down the infringing account. This should clean up the issue quickly, but represents little relief for webmasters who do not have control over the spammer’s site.Also, for people who have never heard of a 302 hijack, here is a nice primer: The 302 Exploit

As of this morning, Google has fixed this particularly embarrassing hijack.

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