: Can I capitalize on my spammed open redirect by changing where the redirects point? I have two websites. One is rather old and used to be my main site, and it still has a good bit of PageRank.
I have two websites. One is rather old and used to be my main site, and it still has a good bit of PageRank. The newer site is passing the old one in terms of SEO. On my old site, I have a ASP page that was used to do link track logging (pre google analytics days). Problem is, it's basically an open redirect that looks like this: example.com/track.asp?url=http://example2.com
Over the last 5 days about 50,000 links have been passed through that ASP page, and google WMT recently notified me that many of the links are 404 now. Funnily enough, the redirect is a 302, so I'm not too worried about losing Link Juice to these spammy pages, but I was curious if I could capitalize on what's happening?
My basic idea would be to redirect any of these spammy links to my new site with a 301. So I would update the ASP page code to detect if the link was from a spammer and tell google to go to my new site.
My problem is that I've worked very hard to get SEO up to speed on the new site and don't want this to backfire. Has anyone ever been penalized for this? Because google might assume that I'm also responsible for the backlinks since this looks a bit like link farming.
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You don't want spammy links pointing to your good site. Instead of helping your site rank, they would be more likely to get your site penalized by Google's Penguin algorithm. It penalizes sites that appear to be using shady links to manipulate rankings.
If I were you I would close your open redirect. Modify your tracking redirect so that it only redirects to your own site. Make it so that example.com/track.asp?url=http://example.com works but example.com/track.asp?url=http://example2.com is an error. Even a 404 error would be fine, but a 403 forbidden might be more explicit.
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