Watch: How I Hijacked Rand Fishkin's Blog
In 2012 we copied four pages, including Rand Fishkin's blog, onto our own subdomains and watched Google swap the originals out of its index. The test cases, the search theory behind them, and what webmasters can do to defend against result hijacking.
Transcript
Search engine hijacking is not a hack or a bug. It is actually a built-in feature of Google's search algorithm designed to prevent duplicate content. When Google finds two identical pages on the web, its system is programmed to display the one with the higher PageRank, filtering out the other as a duplicate. This means a larger, more authoritative website can easily overtake a smaller site's ranking by simply copying its content. In real-world tests, researchers successfully hijacked several websites by duplicating their pages on a more authoritative domain. In one test, the copied page completely replaced the original in search results within days. Even Google's authorship markup, which links content to a creator's profile, did little to stop the hijack. In another test with a highly authoritative blog, researchers managed to replace the original results, though only for regional searches. Fortunately, website owners can defend themselves. The most effective shield is using a canonical tag with your full web address. This tag tells search engines which version of a page is the original. While Google treats this as a hint rather than an absolute rule, it remains a crucial defense. Additionally, using absolute internal links ensures that if your content is scraped, the links will still point back to your site, passing authority back to you. Finally, you can use monitoring services to spot stolen content quickly and request its removal before it hurts your search presence.