What is 302 Hijacking?

There you are, minding your business, tending to your website and monitoring your site rankings on the search engines, when you see something, er, not quite right in the results pages. It’s a listing for your website, with your page titles, and your text content, but… but… but…someone else’s URL!!

It’s called 302 hijacking, and it certainly is disturbing to webmasters. What could be worse than all of your hard work on SEO being ruined, your fabulous site listings hijacked by some evildoer, and your beloved targeted site traffic being intercepted and sent to someone else’s website?

The good news is that the search engines are working hard to close the hole in their systems that allows this to happen. More good news is that apparently, most 302 hijacking occurs accidentally and is not the dastardly deeds of internet pirates.

What should you do if this happens to you? Google will respond to your problem if you submit it via: http://www.google.com/support/bin/request.py

Read more about 302 hijacking at Matt Cutts’ Blog.