What Is Hijacking in SEO?
In SEO, hijacking refers to unethical or manipulative techniques used to steal visibility, traffic, or rankings from a competitor’s website—typically one that is performing well in search engine results.
Hijacking is considered a black hat SEO practice, as it often violates search engine guidelines and exploits technical loopholes to divert user traffic or undermine the authority of a legitimate site.
The primary goal of hijacking is to redirect search engine users or search engine signals (like backlinks and relevance) away from the original site and toward the attacker’s website—often without the user or site owner noticing right away.