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. Ourquality 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 forsneaky redirects with examples that illustrate redirect-related violations.

We have also updated thehacked content guidelines to include redirects on compromised websites. If you believe your site has been compromised, follow these instructions toidentify 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 ourWebmaster Help Forum.

Posted byAaseesh Marina, Search Quality Team