Wednesday, April 30, 2014
Redirects are often used by webmasters to help forward visitors from one page to another. They are
a normal part of how the web operates, and are very valuable when well used. However, some
redirects are designed to manipulate or deceive search engines or to display different content to
human users than to search engines. Our
quality guidelines
strictly forbid these kinds of redirects.
For example, desktop users might receive a normal page, while hackers might redirect all mobile
users to a completely different spam domain. To help webmasters better recognize problematic
redirects, we have updated our quality guidelines for
sneaky redirects with examples
that illustrate redirect-related violations.
We have also updated the
hacked content guidelines to include
redirects on compromised websites. If you believe your site has been compromised, follow these
instructions to
identify the issues on your site and fix them.
As with any violation of our quality guidelines, we may take manual action, including removal from
our index, in order to maintain the quality of the search results. If you have any questions about
our guidelines, you can ask in our
Webmaster Help Forum.
How we apply this
We archive Search Central announcements because client questions often trace back to a change that was announced years ago. Reading the original is faster than reconstructing it from second-hand summaries.
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