Webmaster Central Blog
Official news on crawling and indexing sites for the Google index
Webmaster Guidelines for sneaky redirects updated
Wednesday, April 30, 2014
Webmaster Level: All
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, feel free to ask in our
Webmaster Help Forum
.
Posted by Aaseesh Marina, Search Quality Team
Hey!
Check here if your site is mobile-friendly.
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