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12/03/2004: "Amnesty Offered Spammers to Help Fix Google Hijacking Vulnerability"

3 Dec 2004

Discussion monitoring site Threadwatch points to an insiders' forum where a Google representative is calling for help among the search engine optimization vendor crowd to help the search engine prevent "Google results hijacking," a vulnerability Google has that allows cheating sites to steal the high rankings that other sites would otherwise have gotten. The vulnerability appears to stem from Google's manner of indexing the web, which allows a cocktail of 302 redirects and meta refreshes to steal another site's ranking. A longtime forum participant who works for Google even made an offer of amnesty to search engine spammers in a plea to help gain evidence of the practice to help design a fix.