Google Provides More Clarity Around Sneaky Redirects Against Their Guidelines

Google announced on their Webmaster blog that they have updated two of their guideline documents to improve the clarity around what sneaky redirects are against Google Webmaster Guidelines.

Google has expanded their guidelines to ensure webmasters are aware that using sneaky redirects through mobile site detection and redirection, is not allowed if the content is not the same. An excerpt from Google’s revised guidelines indicate a situation where “desktop users receive a normal page, while mobile users are redirected to a completely different spam domain,” as not in accordance with Google’s guidelines.

Here are the two new examples Google placed in their sneaky redirects guideline page:

• Search engines shown one type of content while users are redirected to something significantly different
• Desktop users receive a normal page, while mobile users are redirected to a completely different spam domain

Google also updated the hacked sites page with an content about redirects that reads:

“Hackers might inject malicious code to your website that redirects some users to harmful or spammy pages. The kind of redirect sometimes depends on referrer, user-agent, or device. For example, clicking a URL in Google search results could redirect you to a suspicious page, but there is no redirect when you visit the same URL directly from a browser.”

Google added a warning at the end of their blog post saying that “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.”

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About The Author

Barry Schwartz

Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's can be followed on social media at @rustybrick, +BarrySchwartz and Facebook. For more background information on Barry, see his full bio over here.

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