Page hijacking
Page hijacking is a form of spamdexing (spamming the index of a search engine). It is the act of copying a random but popular webpage with the intent to feed a web crawlers the copied page. The intent is that the copied page appears in search engine results, and when the users click on it, the visitors are redirected to a different, often unrelated, website.
Page hijacking is a form of cloaking, and it is possible because web crawlers detect duplicates as they download web pages, and if two pages have the same content, they keep only one of the URLs.
External links
- "302 Exploit: How somebody else's page can appear instead of your page in the search engines." by Claus Schmidt, March 14, 2005