101 Articles Sneaky Redirect
SNEAKY REDIRECT
Sneaky redirects are used to deceive the search engines and users that show different version of pages to both of them. It usually works in conjunction with cloaking or doorway pages. We have different types of sneaky redirects Some methods used for search engine spamming are:
1. JavaScript redirects:
Traditionally search engines avoided crawling and indexing JavaScript. They did this to avoid any problem that would occur while crawling scripts. Search engines had problems crawling scripts especially where loops exist they get caught in infinite loop and they repeatedly attempt crawling pages which creates extreme load on the server and sometimes the server crashes. Because of this phenomenon they stopped crawling complicated Java or VB scripts. Aggressive search engine optimizers took this to their advantage and create junk keyword stuffed pages and when someone clicks on the results from the search engine they get redirected to a good flash or nice looking html page with images. To avoid this problem now almost all top search engines detect and crawl scripts and they penalize a site if they find a website doing redirect spam. It is rare to see such tactics being used today but still we can see it.
2. Mouseover redirects:
Similar to JavaScript we can write redirect on mouse over command on a page. When the mouse is moved over the page immediately the page redirects to a page meant for users from a page meant for search engines. Code is very simple but was useful for spammers
A big SEO company famous for doing this is Traffic power (https://www.searchenginegenie.com/traffic-power.htm ). They were banned by Google for using such a tactic and it led to lawsuits against SEO book for writing publically about them.
3. Meta refresh redirect:
This redirect is used to redirect to another page using Meta refresh tag. Here is a small sample code:
Redirect to http://example.com/ immediately:
You can set a time delay where content = 5 which will take 5 seconds to redirect.
4. Frames redirect:
Redirect using frames was another way of redirection for the search engines. When a page is loaded with the following code
More redirects are applicable but I have listed the common ones here. Some redirects can be done directly on the server like the 301, 302 redirects and even they are at times abused by User-agent detection. Check for more redirects from the Wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/URL_redirection
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Images |
JavaScript Method redirect:
Meta Refresh redirect:
Mouse Over redirect:
Frames redirect:
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Screen Shots |
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Graph on Sneaky redirect |
The most commonly used redirection method is the JavaScript redirect followed by Meta tag, then Mouse Over and Frames redirect to manipulate the Search Engines.
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Source Code |
Java script code:
Meta refresh redirect code:
Mouseover redirect code:
Frames redirect code example:
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Working Example |
A working example of Mouse Over Redirect:
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References |
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Other sites that refer to the same manipulation tactic are as follows |