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Is my SEO hurt using this type of redirects? (blacksuitlabs.com)

1 points by juanpdelat ↗ HN
I've seen many websites, specially social networks, allowing their users to have on their profiles a link to their own website/blog, but in reality they all are using redirects.

I wonder why are they doing this? I imagine it's because is a cheap way to get links with "valuable" anchor texts, so I decided to try it myself.

I'd like to make sure this is not going to hurt my SEO.

Side question, what is happening with my page rank when using window.location.replace(redirectURL)?

PS. I am sorry if anything I just said/ask doesn't make sense.

3 comments

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[dead] juanpdelat
I've seen many websites, specially social networks, allowing their users to have on their profiles a link to their own website/blog, but in reality they all are using redirects.

I wonder why are they doing this? I imagine it's because is a cheap way to get links with "valuable" anchor texts, so I decided to try it myself.

I'd like to make sure this is not going to hurt my SEO.

Side question, what is happening with my page rank when using window.location.replace(redirectURL)?

PS. I am sorry if anything I just said/ask doesn't make sense.

billslawski
Upon clicking a link, you're sending a 404 status code message to browsers/user agents. Search engine crawlers likely aren't going to follow past that.

So everything you link to appears to be a broken link, and the pages are all about links.

What kind of quality score might a search engine give a page that's completely filled with broken links? Probably not too high.

juanpdelat
Ok I noticed some weird behaviour with links found on google news (even feeds from google news use the origial url as a get variable on their url), those were making my drupal installation detect a 404. I've made some changes and now every redirect is a 302, any thoughts on that?

BTW thanks a lot for noticing the 404 statuses.