Page Hijacking

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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
Technology Specialist
Margaret Rouse
Technology Specialist

Margaret is an award-winning writer and educator known for her ability to explain complex technical topics to a non-technical business audience. Over the past twenty years, her IT definitions have been published by Que in an encyclopedia of technology terms and cited in articles in the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and Discovery Magazine. She joined Techopedia in 2011. Margaret’s idea of ​​a fun day is to help IT and business professionals to learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.