If so, you may have been a pagejacker’s victim.
But it’s not you that someone is after.
It’s your page clicks and views.
What Is Pagejacking?
Pagejacking is a key in of online fraud where visitors are redirected to another website without their knowledge.
The term “pagejacking” is coined from two words: webpage and hijacking.
Pagejacking has existed for a while but remains a growing trend.
Traffic is the primary currency for securing and amassing revenue on the internet.
How Does Pagejacking Work?
You might suddenly notice subtle discrepancies in the content that paint the original website badly.
You’ve been mousetrapped!
Newbie pagejackers copy a webpage page and paste it onto a page on their site.
They can include offers and adjust the links in your content to redirect to other pages on their site.
However, the more advanced pagejacking strategy is quite clever.
First, the pagejacker takes a copy of a page (usually popular).
The pagejacker then includes extra codes so only search engine bots can read the page’s content.
This technique is called “cloaking.”
Cloaking involves presenting different content to search engine bots.
If it is, the bot is shown legitimate content from the original site.
If it’s a human visitor, they are shown a different page, often with ads or spam.
Who Is at Risk of Pagejacking?
The first step is identifying uncommon phrases on a popular page on your site.
Run these phrases through a query on popular search engines like Google.
High-ranking pages are usually crawled regularly, so the cached copy should be reasonably fresh.
Use Anti-Cloaking Solutions
Use anti-cloaking solutions to prevent the website from being cloaked.
Anti-cloaking solutions can detect and block cloaking by detecting the technique used.
They also provide a way to notify you if any cloaking happens on your website.
To be safe, open a site from your bookmarks or pop in the link in the address bar.
As a site owner, it is a different case.
So, taking legal action is advised.
If you have identified pagejacked content, you also need to save the cached copy of the page.
It can serve as evidence later on.
Pagejacking: A Nightmare
The internet offers many different kinds of experiences.
When you have issues like this, as a site owner, report the pagejacker.
you’ve got the option to also take further legal action.
