Page Hijacking

What Does Page Hijacking Mean?

Page hijacking is a technical form of redirecting Web traffic that exploits certain glitches in search engines. Page hijacking involves creating a site that roughly duplicates the content of an existing site, then games search engine ranking systems to make sure that the second, duplicated site gets more recognition than the original. The goal in page hijacking is to make the second page more prominent than the first.

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Less often, page hijacking can also refer to when the owner or creator of a page loses control of that page, as in certain social media situations.

Page hijacking may also be called 203 hijacking.

Techopedia Explains Page Hijacking

The way 302 hijacking works is through a very technical use of a script that was originally meant to temporarily redirect site visitors. By flagging an existing page as temporary, a hijacker can lower its ranking and boost its own duplicate page. This can go along with other types of hacking, such as phishing and other types of fraudulent activity.

As the Internet development community has become more informed about 302 hijacking, the vulnerabilities that allowed for this strategy have largely been fixed. Page hijacking has become less of an issue, although the idea is still debated in some circles.

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Margaret Rouse

Margaret Rouse is an award-winning technical writer and teacher known for her ability to explain complex technical subjects to a non-technical, business audience. Over the past twenty years her explanations have appeared on TechTarget websites and she's been cited as an authority in articles by the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine and Discovery Magazine.Margaret's idea of a fun day is helping IT and business professionals learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages. If you have a suggestion for a new definition or how to improve a technical explanation, please email Margaret or contact her…