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
-
Timeviewer vs teamviewer
Hi everyone, here the issue I need to know if you can help or not, a website called timeviewer.tv. Now the problem is, when you search for 'timeviewer', Google will tell you do you want to 'search for teamviewer instead'? I want people to be able to search timeviewer purely without the need to click on search for timeviewer instead. How can this be accompplished? Thanks everyone. Luca
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Luca_Tagliaferro0 -
Clean-up Question after a wordpress site Hack added pages with external links from a massive link wheel?
Hey All, Thought I would throw this out to ensure I am dotting my "i's" and crossing my "t's"..... Client WordPress site was hacked injected 3-4 pages that cross linked to hundreds (affiliate junk spam link wheel). Pages were removed, 3rd party cleared all malware/viruses. Heavy duty firewall and security monitoring are in place. Hacked pages are now showing as 404. No penalties, ranking issues....If anything there was a temporary BOOST in rankings due to the large link-wheel type net that the pages were receiving....That has since leveled out rankings. I guess my question is, in your opinion is it best to let those pages 404, I am noticing a large amount of links going to them from all over the world from this large link net that was built. I find the temptation to 301 re-direct deleted pages to the homepage difficult...lol..{the temptation is REAL}. Is there anything I am missing? Any other steps that YOU would take? I am assuming letting those pages 404 would be the best bet, as in time they will roll off index.... Thank you in advance, I appreciate any feedback or opinions....
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Anthony_Howard0 -
Acquire domains to boost yours, how to redirect an acquired domain
What is the best way to redirect for best SEO benefits? Examples: glaspunt.nl -> glas.nl fietstassen.eu -> loodgieter.nl Any technical information how to (root) redirect for best SEO practices?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | remkoallertz0 -
301 Redirect Asp.net Help
Hey, we are redesigning the site and we are changing a lot of urls to make them more SEO friendly But some of the old urls have PR 4-5 What is the best way to do about this? How to do a 301 redirect for specific pages in asp.net Or do you recommend something elsE? Thanks in advance
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Madz0 -
Competitor using "unatural inbound links" not penalized??!
Since Google's latest updates, I think it would be safe to say that building links is harder. But i also read that Google applies their latest guidelines retro-actively. In other words, if you have built your ilnking profile on a lot of unnatural links, with spammy anchor text, you will get noticed and penalized. In the past, I used to use SEO friendly directories and "suggest URL's" to build back links, with keyword/phrase anchor text. But I thought that this technique was frowned upon by Google these days. So, what is safe to do? Why is Google not penalizing the competitor? And bottom line what is considered to be "unnatural link building" ?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | bjs20101 -
Local Listing Question
We have a client that has signed on with a national business network for contractors. This was done without our consent, so I wanted to get everyone's feel on whether or not we should talk them out of continuing this partnership. The example I am showing is not our client, but they are part of this network and have the exact type of setup. Regular website: http://www.palmerheatingandcooling.com
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | JohnWeb12
Network webpage: http://www.heatingandair.com/annapolis-marlyand Regular Google Plus Local Profile: https://plus.google.com/117245435648294066529/about?hl=en
Network Google Plus Local Profile: https://plus.google.com/112323273882064003718/about?hl=en Here is a local search with both profiles showing up:http://goo.gl/8fxZV
I have attached a screenshot of the results. Is this type of partnership ok in Google's eyes? Is this network listing going to hurt their regular listing in the future? ZGPJfvi0 -
Rel Noindex Nofollow tag vs meta noindex nofollow robots
Hi Mozzers I have a bit of thing I was pondering about this morning and would love to hear your opinion on it. So we had a bit of an issue on our client's website in the beginning of the year. I tried to find a way around it by using wild cards in my robots.txt but because different search engines treat wild cards differently it dint work out so well and only some search engines understood what I was trying to do. so here goes, I had a parameter on a big amount of URLs on the website with ?filter being pushed from the database we make use of filters on the site to filter out content for users to find what they are looking for much easier, concluding to database driven ?filter URLs (those ugly &^% URLs we all hate so much*. So what we looking to do is implementing nofollow noindex on all the internal links pointing to it the ?filter parameter URLs, however my SEO sense is telling me that the noindex nofollow should rather be on the individual ?filter parameter URL's metadata robots instead of all the internal links pointing the parameter URLs. Am I right in thinking this way? (reason why we want to put it on the internal links atm is because the of the development company states that they don't have control over the metadata of these database driven parameter URLs) If I am not mistaken noindex nofollow on the internal links could be seen as page rank sculpting where as onpage meta robots noindex nofolow is more of a comand like your robots.txt Anyone tested this before or have some more knowledge on the small detail of noindex nofollow? PS: canonical tags is also not doable at this point because we still in the process of cleaning out all the parameter URLs so +- 70% of the URLs doesn't have an SEO friendly URL yet to be canonicalized to. PSS: another reason why this needs looking at is because search engines won't be able to make an interpretation of these pages (until they have been cleaned up and fleshed out with unique content) which could result in bad ranking of the pages which could conclude to my users not being satisfied, so over and above the SEO factor, usability of the site is being looked at here as well, I don't want my users to land on these pages atm. If they navigate to it via the filters then awesome because they are defining what they are looking for with the filters. Would love to hear your thoughts on this. Thanks, Chris Captivate.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | DROIDSTERS0 -
Question #1 - My Cherry's Popped!
I recently acquired rights to a URL that is one of our keywords. Instead of developing a landing page with that URL and then only linking it back to the company root, I was thinking about adding a link within the company's global nav that pushes to this new URL (and new page content of course). Are there any Pros or Cons to doing it that way? Thank you so much!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | GladdySEO0