Question about "sneaky" vs. non-sneaky redirects?
-
One of my client's biggest keyword competitors is using, what I believe to be, sneaky redirects. The company is a large, international corporation that has a local office. They use a totally unrelated domain name for local press and advertising, but there is no website. The anchor text in the backlinks automatically redirects to the corporate website. Is this sneaky or not?
-
Is this sneaky or not?
It's dumb... and kinda sneaky.
Dumb, because they would have been smarter to point the links to their main website, instead of using an intermediate website.
It's dumb because they waste money on domain registration and hosting.
It's dumb because there is a loss of power in the redirect.
It's dumb because Google doesn't like links on press release sites or any kind of site where you pay for a page that has pagerank-passing links on it.
So, its dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb.. and kinda sneaky.
-
Is this strictly online advertising you're talking about? If so, that's just weird, I can't imagine a scenario in which I'd want links passing through a redirect. I wouldn't considered this sneaky or deceitful, but on their part, it's unwise to not be linking straight to the resolving domain and you should jump for joy that your competitor's links aren't carrying as much weight as they should.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Spam Score & Redirecting Inbound Links
Hi, I recently downloaded a spreadsheet of inbound links to my client sites and am trying to 301 redirect the ones that are formatted incorrectly or just bad links in general (they all link to the site domain, but they used to have differently formatted urls on their old site, or the link URL in general has strange stuff on it). My question is, should I even bother redirecting these links if their spam score is a little high (i.e. 20-40%)? it already links to the existing domain, just with a differently formatted URL. I just want to make sure it goes to a valid URL on the site, but I don't want to redirect to a valid URL if it's going to harm the client's SEO. Also not sure what to do about the links with the --% spam score. I really appreciate any input as I don't have a lot of experience with how to deal with spammy links.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | AliMac260 -
Spam signals from old company site are hurting new company site, but we can't undo the redirect.
My client was forced to change its domain name last year (long story). We were largely able to regain our organic rankings via 301-redirects. Recently, the rankings for the new domain have begun to plummet. Nothing specific took place that could have caused any ranking declines on the new site. However, when we analyze links to the OLD site, we are seeing a lot of link spam being built to that old domain over recent weeks and months. We have no idea where these are coming from but they appear to be negatively impacting our new site. We cannot dismantle the redirects as the old site has hundreds, if not thousands, of quality links pointing to it, and many customers are accustomed to going to that home page. So those redirects need to stay in place. We have already disavowed all the spam we have found on the old Search Console. We are continuing to do so as we find new spam links. But what are we supposed to do about this spam negatively impacting our new site? FYI we have not received any messages in the search console.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | FPD_NYC1 -
Could lots of links pointed to 301 & 302 redirects be a problem?
Hello, We've got hundreds of links found in screaming frog that are pointing towards 301 & 302 redirects. Could this be hurting rankings? We've got very few 404s. A lot of the problem is breadcrumbs of categories pointing to 302s, but the original category pages that are 302ed are not indexed so we may be OK. We can't change the 302 redirects, it's part of the cart. Could all these non-updated hyperlinks be the cause of continual ranking drop in Google? We've gone from the top 3 to the second page for our main terms. Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
Question Regarding Keyword
Hi All, I am currently working on a travel site. Would for example Boutique Hotels in New York | Luxury Hotels in New York be considered keyword stuffing?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | appnyc0 -
Question about local SEO when you serve many more cities than you have brick and mortar locations
My URL is: http://www.mollysmusic.org for the record.I run a music school that serves in-home lessons to a whole slew of cities. Since I only have 3 brick-and-mortar locations, I can't make google local profiles for all the cities served, but I want to get seen by those people searching in their own cities. Right now, our biggest competitor, takelessons.com, is top ranked for every single city you can think of, because they have individual web pages for every city served. Their content is repetitive and scrapey, and to me, that says "doorway page" which supposedly can get you de-indexed. I'm reluctant to do that because I'm afraid I'll get banned, but I have to compete. I also want a strategy that can scale when we move into new areas. Is there something that makes TakeLessons's content NOT a doorway page? What's the best practice for getting ranked in multiple individual cities if you run a service? Thanks in advance.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | mollysmusic0 -
301 Redirect?
Is it black-hat SEO to send bluewidget.com, redwidget.com, and greewidget.com to widgetbrands.com (send all to the same page, or same domain home0? Since the domain name matching with keywords is important, this strategy makes sense. It is allowed? How many domains can I 301 redirect to widgetbrands.com if I want to target all the colors of widgets? I'd be willing to put up a one page keyword article of original content for the search engines to crawl before redirecting the 'bluewidget' page. Would this be necessary
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Uramark0 -
Do bad links "hurt" your ranking or just not add any value
Do bad links "hurt" your ranking or just not add any value. By this I mean, if you do have links from link farms and bad neighbourhoods, would it effectively pull you down in search engine rankings. Or is it more that it's just a waste of time to get these links, as it adds no value to your ranking. Are google saying avoid them because it will not have a positive effect, or avoid them becuase it will have a negative effect. I am under the opinion that it will not harm, but it will not help either. I think this because at the end of the day you are not 100% in control of your inbound links, any bad site could add you and if a competitor, god forbid, wanted to play some black hat games, couldn't they just add you to thousands of bad sites to pull your ranking down? Interested to hear your opinions on the matter, or any "facts" if they are out there.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | esendex0