Baidu announced recently that it’s upgrading its Beacon-Fire algorithm to fight hyperjacking – Beacon-Fire 1.0 and Beacon-Fire 2.0 were released on Feb 2017 and May 2018 respectively.
Baidu claimed that hyperjacking is “extremely harmful” to search engine users and listed two forms of hyperjacking: jump hijacking and back hijacking.
In either case, visitors would be redirected to a false Baidu search result page or a page filled with ads or even viruses.
But maybe because there are too many malicious websites in China, which might involve Baidu’s ad interests, Baidu shows an attitude of tolerance towards even such unfriendly behaviors.
It announced that sites targeted by Beacon-Fire algorithm would receive a message, so that they could improve their sites in a period as long as one month, to avoid any punishment.
And if the improvement is not done in one month, webmasters would still have three months to finish editing their sites, during which their appearance in Baidu’s search results would be limited.
And a permanent limitation of site would happen only upon the third discovery of hyperjacking after the two observation periods totaling four months.