301 or Canonical to handle Site Jacking?

consultant1027 · 08-10-2011, 11:15 AM

Noticed a few domains that are pointing to my IP address for some reason. As a result if you do a search on Google for: my company name site

therguysdomain.com you see these other domains are indexed with duplicates of all my pages. (This is not a scraping technique, they are essentially hosting their domain on the same IP address as mine - anyone can point their domain to any IP.)

I'm trying to decide to handle it by doing a 301 redirect that changes URLs that changes the foreign domain to my domain. I'm leary about doing this because most of these sites are very fishy sites (Russian sites with spammy content). Wouldn't Google think these are all doorway sites?

If I use the rel canonical tag, I'm going to have to do it dynamically by just reading the request URI and replacing the domain as oppose to hand-coding because our site is 90% dynamic (lots of form field values in the URLs). This actually seems like the better route since it is telling Google the original content for this page is at our site and it isn't telling them (I hope) that this page has been MOVED (redirected) - at least not as strongly as the 301.

What I want to tell Google is - we own this content but we have nothing to do with these other domains!

One funny thing I thought about doing was hijacking THEIR domain! In essence all I have to do is setup their domain on my server config (its a dedicated server). I could then host whatever content I wanted on their domain (as long as they kept pointing to our IP) and thereby leverage what domain authority they had by passing link juice through links to our site. Problem is, it can be time consuming to setup the site with unique content and enough of it so Google doesn't consider it a doorway.

dburk · 08-10-2011, 02:17 PM

Hi consultant1027,

It sounds like you are the victim of the 302 Google Hijack.

You should be able to deal with this dynamically with both the canonical link tag as well as the 301 redirect. Use a server-side redirect for any host domain other than your own domain.

08-10-2011, 11:15 AM	#1
consultant1027 Active Warrior Join Date: Oct 2009 Posts: 77 Thanks: 0 Thanked 0 Times in 0 Posts	301 or Canonical to handle Site Jacking? Noticed a few domains that are pointing to my IP address for some reason. As a result if you do a search on Google for: my company name sitetherguysdomain.com you see these other domains are indexed with duplicates of all my pages. (This is not a scraping technique, they are essentially hosting their domain on the same IP address as mine - anyone can point their domain to any IP.) I'm trying to decide to handle it by doing a 301 redirect that changes URLs that changes the foreign domain to my domain. I'm leary about doing this because most of these sites are very fishy sites (Russian sites with spammy content). Wouldn't Google think these are all doorway sites? If I use the rel canonical tag, I'm going to have to do it dynamically by just reading the request URI and replacing the domain as oppose to hand-coding because our site is 90% dynamic (lots of form field values in the URLs). This actually seems like the better route since it is telling Google the original content for this page is at our site and it isn't telling them (I hope) that this page has been MOVED (redirected) - at least not as strongly as the 301. What I want to tell Google is - we own this content but we have nothing to do with these other domains! One funny thing I thought about doing was hijacking THEIR domain! In essence all I have to do is setup their domain on my server config (its a dedicated server). I could then host whatever content I wanted on their domain (as long as they kept pointing to our IP) and thereby leverage what domain authority they had by passing link juice through links to our site. Problem is, it can be time consuming to setup the site with unique content and enough of it so Google doesn't consider it a doorway.

08-10-2011, 02:17 PM	#2
dburk Senior Warrior Member Join Date: Nov 2005 Location: Tampa, Florida Posts: 4,643 Thanks: 162 Thanked 671 Times in 581 Posts Contact Info	Re: 301 or Canonical to handle Site Jacking? Hi consultant1027, It sounds like you are the victim of the 302 Google Hijack. You should be able to deal with this dynamically with both the canonical link tag as well as the 301 redirect. Use a server-side redirect for any host domain other than your own domain.
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