I'm curious about a cgi link management system that is gaining great results in Google, but I'm curious if it is spamming the search engines.

The links are gaining placements in the search engines and when someone click on the site in the SERPS, it is re-directed to the person's site that is in the link directory.

This search in Google: http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&q=san+clemente+real+estate

About the 6th or 7th position is this site:
www.greatchicagorealestate.com/ cgi-bin/hotlinks/out.cgi?id=229

When you click on the link in Google, you are redirected to the website. Is this a bad link management system? Does this look 'spammy' to the SE's?

Search engines typically do not like redirection of any kind. While this has obviously not tripped any automatic spam filters, it doesn't mean Google won't find some way to combat it down the road.

Congrats SEW, u just got your first "is google guy here" spam report lol! ;-)

Nick

Depends how you define spam.

Looks like we have a G SERP link that points to a page with a CGI redirect on it. But if you look at the G cache of the SERP link, it is the same page that the CGI eventually redirects the searcher to, i.e., the searcher lands on the original page that G indexed. Not typical spam.

Even so, like DW said:
>Search engines typically do not like redirection of any kind.

So besides the risk of attracting a redirect penalty whats the harm to anyone? And what is the anticipated benefit of this technique?

Maybe there is a is a spammy reason to do this that I can't think of it ..... somebody please chime in.

Depends how you define spam.


No, it doesnt. It depends on whether the site that's now under scrutiny is another SEW members site and whether or not you choose to recognize it.

Nick

301 Redirect OK for 404 Error pages?

So besides the risk of attracting a redirect penalty whats the harm to anyone? And what is the anticipated benefit of this technique?

This script was purchased thru a web dev website. They offer a lot of other useful scripts. This link management script was just one of them. I know they purchased it because of ease to manage their sites and they sites they do linking with. I don't necessarily think they have any idea that their link pages are actually achieving positions in G SERPS and redirecting to the actual link.

No, it doesnt. It depends on whether the site that's now under scrutiny is another SEW members site and whether or not you choose to recognize it.

No...it isn't, but I do exchange some links with this guy and wondered if it is harming the sites I'm linking with. I wouldn't want the sites to get penalized for any reason and if this does look bad in the eyes of G, then I would like to notify him and let him know as well.

I posted the following link in a new SEW thread called
MIA in Google? Google bug allows 3rd party hijacking…

Adam - looks like you were on the right track, too bad none of us really looked into this more ... it does indeed look like certain links managment softwares are causing some havoc.

http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum3/25638.htm