Comments on: Google Toolbar Hijacks Custom 404 Pages, Webmasters Not Happy

By: Dustin

Dustin — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 21:01:47 +0000

This is major bull!

Not only the hijacking also google offers custom 404 widgets that take you off site and display your site relevant pages with google ads along side.

I swear google has confused search with ADs!

Sorry I feel a little irritated with this whole this cause google is in a great position to show great ethics.

Instead it seems business as usual.

By: Filipina

Filipina — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 06:37:25 +0000

I am bit worried about these toolbars. Today I tried to install the Alexa toolbar and my anti-virus software flagged a warning that the toolbar contains adware.

By: iain

iain — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 14:23:16 +0000

i cant say i would be happy if this was to happen on any of my sites,the hassle you have to go through not to mention cost of bringing in people to your site so that they may be redirected somewhere else is criminal

By: TheDoozie

TheDoozie — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 11:41:21 +0000

Instead of cleaning the spam from their index and create a really reliable ranking algorithm, Mighty G is worried about error pages…I must be really stupid but I am not understanding anything here

By: Alphane Moon

Alphane Moon — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 09:49:03 +0000

It seems that the 404-Hijacking is triggered by the file size of the error page. If it contains less than a certain amount of bytes, the Google version will show up (less than 512 byte).

Using a custom error page that displays some text and/or a sitemap should be bigger than that.

However, I do not like the idea that “alien” content could be displayed on my domain, even in error documents. If there is only a default error document of the server, this should be respected.

By: Loren Baker, Editor

Loren Baker, Editor — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 17:12:47 +0000

Hmmm… interesting spin to 404 hijacking.

Microsoft did this in the past with their toolbar, not sure if they still do or not.

Verisign used to do something similar with domain typos:
http://www.webadvantage.net/tip_archive.cfm?tip_id=285&&a=1