[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Why buy domains and 301 redirect them to me?
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Ask HN: Why buy domains and 301 redirect them to me?
Say I'm running a SaaS product, example.com. Somebody has bought
several domains like getexample.com, buyexample.io,
joinexample.net, and is 301 redirecting them to example.com.
What's their play here? Is this setup for a phishing attack in the
future? Are they just going to try and sell the domains to me in
the future? Not encountered behaviour like this before (or at
least, I don't know if this is the beginning phase of a common
scam)
Author : HughParry
Score : 184 points
Date : 2025-01-24 13:20 UTC (9 hours ago)
| joehx2 wrote:
| People do this for SEO purposes. They think that this increases
| the amount of backlinks to their site, thus increasing their rank
| in Google and other search engines.
|
| This is less true than it used to be, but people still do it.
| lupire wrote:
| Backlinks to _which_ site?
|
| The fraudulent domains are only sending traffic to OP.
|
| My guess is that they want to either phish visitors, or they
| want to ask OP for affiliate revenue, like a digital version of
| the guys who wash your windshield or your shoes without asking
| first, and then ask for money.
|
| Or planning to threaten to divert organic traffic through the
| impersonation domains away from the canonical domain, if you
| don't pay them.
| MattyK_ wrote:
| "Wash your winshield" lol are you South African?
| HughParry wrote:
| Sure, but it's not their site, it's mine!
|
| And they're not obvious mouse slips like redirecting googl.com
| -> google.com - they're more of the form <verb>mydomain.com.
|
| I was mostly interested in what the actual play from them here
| is tbh
| TheGeminon wrote:
| Maybe they'll try to build up traffic to your site from those
| domains and then push to sell them to you/extort by removing
| the redirects?
| HughParry wrote:
| Just feels like such an odd play lol. If they could
| organically generate leads/traffic that I'd be willing to
| get extorted over, then surely they would also have the
| means to start a marketing agency that I'd be willing to
| pay far more for?
| phoe-krk wrote:
| They'll weaponize them at some point. How exactly is to be seen,
| but if people associate your product with domains you do not
| control (e.g. via SEO searches and hyperlinks left in public
| places), then everyone is on the hook the moment these domains
| stop redirecting to your service.
| eastbound wrote:
| Yes, they can send legit-looking email with getexample.com,
| then people will accept those emails as trusted, such as
| lifecycle emails.
|
| Then they send an invoice...
| napsterbr wrote:
| Whatever their play, detect and drop the redirects. Good job on
| noticing it early on!
| HughParry wrote:
| Presumably just throwing a 403 if they have this referrer is ok
| and won't have a weird SEO impact or something?
| thiago_fm wrote:
| No, and the earlier you do the better.
|
| Later it might have
| jsheard wrote:
| Couldn't the attacker evade that by sending _Referrer-Policy:
| no-referrer_ with their redirect?
| HughParry wrote:
| Good shout. Can always block based on origin header though
| (when under the assumption that it's a legit browser) since
| it's a forbidden header name.
|
| https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
| US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Or...
| gruez wrote:
| I just tested on firefox and it doesn't send the "Origin"
| header when using referrerpolicy="no-referrer". It's also
| not present when navigating using the url bar directly.
| kbolino wrote:
| Neither the Origin nor the Referer headers have anything
| to do with a 301 redirect.
| kbolino wrote:
| You cannot detect a 301 redirect when you're only in control of
| the destination.
| eastbound wrote:
| Not through the referrer?
| kbolino wrote:
| If you go straight to bad-domain.com which redirects to
| good-domain.com, there will be no referer at all.
|
| If you click a link on red-herring.com which points to bad-
| domain.com, which then redirects to good-domain.com, the
| referer will be red-herring.com.
|
| HTTP redirects have no effect on the referer.
| wpdb wrote:
| mostly for phishing (if you're successful), to send e-mail
| looking like from you
| HanClinto wrote:
| This sounds very plausible. Then if they click on their link or
| manually type in the website corresponding to the e-mail
| address, it goes to your (very official) site.
|
| Of all the answers presented so far, this one feels the most
| plausible to me.
| Rauchg wrote:
| It's possible `/` redirects but other hidden routes phish. If
| someone gets e.g.: a fake password reset email, it might help the
| attacker bypass sanity checks users make.
| ActionHank wrote:
| Also helps create phishing report "false" flags.
|
| If I target a specific region with a phishing link and redirect
| if the requestor is not in that region I can probably maintain
| my phishing domains for longer.
| lpellis wrote:
| Do you have an affiliate plan, or likely to have one? Maybe they
| plan to redirect with their affiliate ID at some point?
| HughParry wrote:
| Don't have an affiliate program, and I don't think we've got
| anything to suggest we will have one in the future (frankly our
| billing process is pretty bare bones and affiliate stuff isn't
| something we're looking at right now).
|
| We're a small bot security/captcha company and pretty regularly
| get various attacks thrown at us - figuring out if somebody is
| up to something more along those lines was my main concern.
| tyleo wrote:
| Can you provide more information about what's in the headers?
| Additionally, are there any tracking parameters appended to the
| URL?
|
| I'm guessing it will look normal but it could provide some
| insights if something weird is there.
| HughParry wrote:
| Just had a look - looks like pretty regular/reasonable
| cloudflare default stuff as far as I can tell. The headers
| relating to error reporting are the only thing that stand out a
| little, though it doesn't look unreasonable.
|
| ---
|
| Headers
|
| ---
|
| HTTP/2 301
|
| date: Fri, 24 Jan 2025 13:59:51 GMT
|
| content-type: text/html
|
| content-length: 167
|
| location: <the website in question>
|
| cache-control: max-age=3600
|
| expires: Fri, 24 Jan 2025 14:59:51 GMT
|
| report-to: {"endpoints":[{"url":"https:\/\/a.nel.cloudflare.com
| \/report\/v4?s=JZu4FOa%2ByynaFOXWYlxaePF9KdRQ0qGUJkfm1F1aK2m3VE
| x6idlvWlb5go%2B08hgSog1zm1zuMobXcVK2BkR4mQD0SEGU%2Bzp2oC6mXPgQs
| %2FUzvOH7LbqAG96jtf9KNqemV8Q%3D"}],"group":"cf-
| nel","max_age":604800}
|
| nel: {"success_fraction":0,"report_to":"cf-
| nel","max_age":604800}
|
| server: cloudflare
|
| cf-ray: 90708be24810e8fe-LHR
|
| alt-svc: h3=":443"; ma=86400
|
| server-timing: cfL4;desc="?proto=TCP&rtt=59748&min_rtt=41108&rt
| t_var=43898&sent=7&recv=8&lost=0&retrans=1&sent_bytes=3535&recv
| _bytes=789&delivery_rate=33797&cwnd=225&unsent_bytes=0&cid=e505
| 2200af7e27a5&ts=145&x=0"
| jcoby wrote:
| If you are seeing 301s logged on your end that is your site
| redirecting to another one.
|
| There isn't a way to see what a referring site did to do the
| redirect (301 or 302 or even a js redirect) in your logs. All
| you'll see is (potentially) the Referer http header.
| bhouston wrote:
| I haven't seen this before but back in the early 2010s I had some
| India-based group that iframed our SaaS website under a new
| domain. I caught it early and implemented this fix:
| https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2896623/how-to-prevent-m...
|
| I think this was a common attack vector around then, but is no
| longer common.
| Beijinger wrote:
| Stupid question:
|
| Can you not detect and prevent this based on the HTTP referrer?
| Maybe reroute to goatse or something....
| sgerenser wrote:
| Consider rerouting to a picture of an egg in an soft-boiled
| egg cup with an uncanny resemblance to male anatomy.
| mr-wendel wrote:
| I'm sure I don't really have to point this out, but...
|
| The last thing you would ever want to do is associate your
| domain name with gross, offensive content like this. The web
| is crawled all the time for snapshot data.
|
| Additionally, you're more likely to cause your own
| (potential) users to stumble on this than anything else.
|
| IMO, the best policy is almost always transparency. If you
| were to redirect users (and referrer-based redirects are a
| fragile thing), send them to a phishing/spam awareness page
| and explain that they most likely arrived from such a source.
| d4mi3n wrote:
| Pretty sure content-securty-policy headers can prevent this
| type of attack these days for browsers that support them.
| Check out the frame-ancestors CSP directive:
| https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
| US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Co...
| AbstractH24 wrote:
| Seeing Google's Picasa mentioned in an answer on that
| stackoverflow was a real throwback
| skirge wrote:
| it can bypass some whitelisting if you for example have redirects
| checking if address is example.com but validation is poorly
| written ("startswith", "contains") , on login page or anywhere
| else.
| teddyh wrote:
| Check out Google's Disavow Links Tool.
| jfoster wrote:
| I don't know if it still happens, but Google used to have an
| issue that I would see in Verbatim mode whereby non-Wikipedia
| domains would rank as particular Wikipedia pages by redirecting
| to Wikipedia. I can't seem to replicate it now, so it might be
| resolved or vary from country to country.
|
| I posted about it at the time, but no one seemed to be able to
| replicate it:
|
| https://x.com/jfozonx/status/1570710776540958723
|
| Always wondered how much traffic those domains were accumulating.
| Even though it was an edge case, it must've been quite a lot in
| aggregate.
| yesthis wrote:
| Yes, phishing. It might happen in the future, it could be
| happening right now, emails from getexample.com, a specific path
| on getexample.com that doesn't redirect to the real thing, etc.
|
| File a DMCA with the registrar and the hosting provider.
| ardillamorris wrote:
| Their play is to send emails with those domains but in the emails
| claiming to be you and when people reading the email go to the
| domain, they see your page (they got redirected).
| pcbmaker20 wrote:
| I think you can check the HTTP_REFERER header and block the
| redirect using your back-end code, like PHP or Node or Python,
| not sure what tech stack you are using.
| colechristensen wrote:
| You can do the same with a load balancer or reverse proxy like
| nginx, and I'd generally prefer do to so at that layer.
| sgc wrote:
| The right play might be to have a custom landing page or header
| / popup on your site indicating that they were referred by a
| fraudulent domain, and to please bookmark your proper domain /
| report if this was via an email link. The traffic might be
| good, just coming in through a bad actor.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| No, just redirect back to HTTP_REFERER. Why?
|
| The user's browser will display a redirect loop error; and
| most importantly, they won't see your domain.
|
| It keeps your name out of it and makes the email domain look
| even more fishy.
| sgc wrote:
| If somebody is using your website to phish, it almost
| certainly means they are targeting people who legitimately
| want your services. It is an executive decision, but I
| personally would let people know, and take the free
| advertising.
| kbolino wrote:
| Redirecting back to the referer will not create a redirect
| loop. The referer is the URL of the site that linked to the
| redirect, not the redirect itself. The redirect does not
| alter the referer in any way. In many cases, there will be
| no referer at all.
|
| I don't know why everyone seems to think that HTTP
| redirects are visible in Referer (or Origin or any other
| header), but that's just not the case: HTTP redirects are
| completely transparent to the destination server.
| Cpoll wrote:
| > I don't know why everyone seems to think that HTTP
| redirects are visible in Referer
|
| They would be if it's a same-origin redirect, no? And I
| was under the impression that 3xx also set it cross
| origin (barring a referrer-policy header), though I'm
| less confident now. (I can't test it ATM).
|
| Edit: I am clearly confused. The browser preserves the
| original referer when performing a 3xx, as you said.
| kbolino wrote:
| The referer is the site that sent the user to the redirect, not
| the redirect itself. You cannot detect 301s from the
| destination only.
| kevinsync wrote:
| This feels like a never-ending cat and mouse activity, but
| depending upon your hosting infrastructure, you ought to be able
| to maintain a list of these domains and 403/404 incoming requests
| that are being referred from the list. Better to just dump them
| to an error / scam warning page than 301 them out to somewhere
| else (to avoid redirect loops)
| bongodongobob wrote:
| I did this for a fraudulent health product. They had .org but not
| .com. Registered .com and redirected it. Waited for SEO to pick
| up on it. Created the page calling it out as fraud. Created some
| social media accounts and put the .com in the about info. Started
| commenting on their posts, anyone that looked at the fake
| profiles would find my page with info on why it was fraudulent.
| TrueDuality wrote:
| As others have mentioned this is likely one of a couple of
| scenarios, roughly ordered by my guess on likelihood:
|
| - Attempting to use your legitimate content and services to
| improve the SEO rank of other domains (even unrelated ones). This
| can usually be checked by looking for a sitemap.xml, there will
| be pages not redirected to your site that contain pages of links.
|
| - Closely following the above, the pages may not be links to
| other sites but might be hosting phishing pages for other
| services unrelated to yours. The redirect here acts as a bluff
| for casual inspection of the domain. You won't see page entries
| in a sitemap.xml file for these ones.
|
| - Attempting to "age" a domain. Not many talk about this option,
| but new domains are a red flag to a lot of automated security
| processes. When purchasing a domain and giving it a history
| associated with a legitimate service they make the domain look
| less suspicious for future malicious use.
|
| - Preparation for a targeted campaign. This is pretty unlikely,
| you need to be really worth a dedicated long term campaign effort
| specifically against you or your company. If you're doing
| controversial/novel research, are managing millions of dollars,
| performing a service a state actor would object to, or have high
| profile clientele then maybe you fall into this category. These
| are patient campaigns and want to make the domain "feel normal
| and official". They won't do anything public with the domain such
| as SEO tweaking or link spam, they'll use these domains only for
| specific targeted one-off low-noise attacks. They're relying on
| staff to see that the domain has been connected to your service
| for years and is likely just a domain someone in marketing
| purchased and forgot about. This is exceptionally rare.
| meigwilym wrote:
| I think the first one is pretty likely.
|
| OP, you can search for "site:getexample.com" which will list
| you any pages that have been indexed for that domain. They
| _might_ have just redirected the homepage. Worth a shot.
| dccoolgai wrote:
| It could be a combo of 1 and 3: a competitor (or someone who
| thinks they might be in the future) ages those domains, then
| points it to their own product later.
| TrueDuality wrote:
| This is another great call-out and semi-common. I can
| definitely get blinded by my security focus but shady
| business tactics drive a lot of these similar domain
| purchases for exactly the reason you described.
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| Regarding point two, OP should connect to a VPN in Japan or
| somewhere he very isn't, use incognito mode, and see if the
| same content is served. I've seen hacked sites that are set up
| to serve normal content to where the attacker thinks the owner
| of the site lives, but serve phishing content or malware or
| whatever to everywhere else.
|
| A 301 fits that bill because then the owners browser even when
| traveling will serve the good content
| TrueDuality wrote:
| Yeah this is a good call-out. If the site is being used for
| drive-by or targeted malware there are other checks that may
| be happening alongside the redirect such as user agent,
| country of origin (like you mentioned), plugins installed,
| OS, or even time of day.
|
| If they detect something that matches what they want, they
| may throw some intermediate 301's to pages that attempt to
| infect the user with something still ultimately redirecting
| to the "normal" page.
| SlightlyLeftPad wrote:
| Just a note 301s are super sticky and browsers cache them
| even across incognito modes. Your best bet is to use a new
| browser after reconnecting to avoid false results.
| nneonneo wrote:
| Really? That seems like a fantastic way to fingerprint
| people. I would be a bit surprised if that was the
| case...
|
| (Fingerprint usage: have
| https://myfingerprint.example.com 301 to
| https://myfingerprint.example.com/unique_id_3b136c1cb,
| then embed https://myfingerprint.example.com in an iframe
| and see which request is made.)
| kqr wrote:
| I'm not GP but a decade ago when I started out as a web
| developer I made the mistake of using 301s in production
| and at the time we never figured out how to get the
| browser to re-learn the responses for those pages without
| drastic measures.
|
| I still never use 301s for that reason. Things may have
| changed, but I dare not try!
| SlightlyLeftPad wrote:
| Interesting use case actually. I had never thought of
| this. I wonder if it's used in the wild
| nneonneo wrote:
| Or, try a mobile user-agent. I've seen loads of phishing
| pages that will only serve their malicious payloads to phones
| - this is especially common with the scams that are sent via
| SMS.
| preinheimer wrote:
| Our service testlocal.ly can grab screenshots for you from
| different countries really quickly if you want a free check.
| tracker1 wrote:
| I'd add canonical link elements to your html and http headers
| in order to reduce the chances of subversion somehow. The whole
| thing feels really weird to me.
| HenryBemis wrote:
| Bait and switch? Get users t bookmark the joinexample.com, and
| the others, and once they notice that people keep going to your
| side via their domain names, they will switch, make a fake
| "change password" and will be ripped off.
| antithesis-nl wrote:
| Phishing. Regular visits to these domains will 301 redirect them
| to you, but there's at least one URL that will instead be handled
| by the scammers themselves.
|
| They'll then send out an email campaign with a From: address in
| the counterfeit domain (which will have valid SPF/DKIM/whatever),
| a subject like "Example.com: You've been invited to join a
| project!", quickly-come-see-this-secret-stuff body copy, and a
| call-to-action button linked to that URL.
|
| The page hosted on the URL will have your branding and
| everything, and collect a bunch of personal information and/or
| access credentials for the scammers.
|
| Taking down this stuff is tedious, but you can try -- least you
| can do for now is display a prominent 'this is not an authorized
| example.com domain' warning for inbound visits from these
| redirects, create a public Knowledge Base-like article warning
| about this abuse as well (making very clear this has nothing to
| do with you), and block the domains involved on your inbound mail
| server.
|
| Silver lining: apparently your SaaS is successful enough to be
| used as a lure for scammers. Congrats?
| kbolino wrote:
| You cannot detect the redirect, so you cannot display any such
| warning.
| zachrip wrote:
| Another alternative is that they will hijack those links once
| they gain traction in search results. Almost as a hedge against
| your future success.
| codegeek wrote:
| Could be for phishing. Is the SAAS in a domain that involves
| money (payments/crypto etc) ? Then even more likely so. I would
| drop those redirects at my webserver level. Easy to d0.
| caseyy wrote:
| I've seen one or two domains like that serving 301s to some IPs
| and their own website to others. This could be a 1000:1 ratio.
| Then they serve an absolutely ad-infested parking page-style
| website to those others. And that's how they skim a little bit of
| revenue off your customers.
|
| They may also represent you to real life businesses for invoice
| scams or credit.
|
| Rare but possible scenarios worth considering.
| aftbit wrote:
| https://prosopo.io/
| bell-cot wrote:
| Whatever their plan - if you have a trademark or similar IP
| protection on "Example", that might be prove extremely useful
| here. (If not - consider getting some protection ASAP.)
|
| It's been a while, and IANAL - but I've seen both domain
| resellers and registrars cave pretty quickly when contacted with
| "that name very obviously infringes on our trademark".
| djsamseng wrote:
| Check if your site has any manual actions against it.
| https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/9044175?sjid=11....
|
| They might be trying to create toxic back links to their domains
| and if those domains 301 to your domain, I believe this can
| negatively impact the SEO of your domain (from what I read). If
| so you can try to disavow them
| https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2648487?hl=en
| maremmano wrote:
| It's likely an attempt to steal usernames and passwords for
| privilege escalation. I had a large corporate client who faced a
| very similar issue. In their case, the scammer not only
| registered similar domains but also created Google Ads campaigns
| targeting those domains. It's worth investigating further and
| taking preventative measures to protect your brand and users.
|
| Check this: https://github.com/kgretzky/evilginx2
| QuantumGood wrote:
| I created this summary for my own reference:
|
| ------ SEO Abuse:
|
| Use your legitimate site to boost the SEO rank of unrelated
| domains. Create toxic backlinks that harm your domain's SEO
| ranking if not properly disavowed.
|
| ----- Phishing Campaigns:
|
| Send emails with their domains (e.g., fake password reset or
| invite emails) claiming to be you, redirecting users to phishing
| pages masquerading as your brand.
|
| Serve phishing content to users based on conditions such as
| geography, user agent, or time of day.
|
| ----- Domain Aging:
|
| "Age" their domain by associating it with your legitimate service
| to make it appear trustworthy for future malicious activities.
| Targeted Malware:
|
| Use redirects to detect vulnerable users and deliver malware or
| drive-by attacks to those targets while serving legitimate
| content to others. Regional Phishing or Malware Delivery:
|
| Redirect normal traffic to your site while targeting specific
| regions for phishing or malware, avoiding detection for longer
| periods.
|
| ----- Hijacking Search Results:
|
| Build up search engine traffic for their domains by associating
| them with your brand and later weaponize the domains (e.g., for
| phishing or fraud). Affiliate Fraud:
|
| Redirect traffic with an affiliate ID (if you use affiliate
| links), attempting to claim commissions fraudulently. Brand
| Impersonation:
|
| Use domains similar to your brand to impersonate your service,
| potentially harming your reputation.
|
| ----- Extortion/Domain Ransom:
|
| Build traffic or search relevance on their domains and later
| attempt to extort money from you by offering to stop the redirect
| or sell the domain.
|
| ----- Invoice Scams:
|
| Represent your service fraudulently to businesses for invoice
| scams or credit fraud.
|
| ----- Bypass Sanity Checks:
|
| Use 301 redirects to bypass user sanity checks, tricking users
| into believing they are visiting legitimate sites.
|
| ---- Traffic Monetization:
|
| Use ad-infested parking pages for a fraction of the traffic and
| redirect the rest to your site to generate revenue.
|
| ----- Reputation Damage:
|
| Cause your brand to be associated with scam or phishing domains,
| which can harm public perception and trust.
|
| ----- Legal Liability:
|
| Misuse of your brand or domain to commit fraud could lead to
| potential legal complications for you.
|
| ----- False Phishing Reports:
|
| Cause false flags in phishing reports, harming your brand
| credibility and delaying the takedown of malicious domains.
| Hidden Routes for Malicious Content:
|
| Redirect general traffic to you while hosting specific malicious
| routes (e.g., URLs hosting phishing or malware).
|
| ----- Impersonation via Emails:
|
| Send emails claiming to be your service, and when users visit the
| domain, they see your page after a redirect, adding legitimacy to
| the scam.
|
| ----- Scam Awareness Manipulation:
|
| Target your traffic by hosting fraudulent educational content or
| warnings related to your domain to sow distrust.
|
| -------------------------- Mitigation Strategies:
| --------------------------
|
| * Monitor Backlinks: Regularly check backlinks and disavow toxic
| links using Google's Disavow Links Tool.
|
| * HTTP Referrer Checks: Implement referrer or origin header-based
| redirects to flag and warn users arriving via fraudulent domains.
|
| * Warn Users: Create a visible warning for users redirected from
| suspicious domains.
|
| * Trademark/IP Enforcement: Leverage trademark protections to
| take action against impersonating domains.
|
| * Manual Domain Actions: Periodically check for indexed pages and
| investigate potential abuses of similar or related domains.
| alberth wrote:
| OT: How did you detect this?
|
| Just curious, seems like something we should all start monitoring
| for.
| lynndotpy wrote:
| Another possibility: Does your example.com point to something
| with an ideological or humanitarian goal?
|
| There was a humanitarian charity I've donated to, and I saw
| people erroneously linking to the wrong URLs when spreading news
| of it. (Say, `foobar.org` and `boofar.com` when the charity is at
| `boofar.org`.)
|
| So, I just bought the URLs and had them redirect to the correct
| URL, before a bad actor could snap them up.
| amyames wrote:
| I can answer this one because it was one of my dirtier SEO
| tricks.
|
| Expired domains and Domains on the marketplace, with hundreds or
| thousands of "backlinks" to them, are valuable. In the listing
| you may see something like "20000 back links." And those links
| are usually worthless , spam, and will vanish as soon as you buy.
| But you can find domains that have real backlinks. TEN backlinks
| from reputable websites are more valuable than a thousand spam
| BLs.
|
| You used to be able to buy and run software , "backlinks
| explorer" to investigate everyone who links to a domain you're
| thinking about buying. And you can also research a "20000
| backlinks" claim to see if this is just someone spamming that
| domain all over blogger and forums.
|
| A good domain to buy will have legit backlinks from real websites
| that the website linked on purpose. If it's been spammed
| thousands of times for a "5000 backlinks claim" , expect google
| to punish it!
|
| Because if you 301 them to your site, google et al assume you're
| the legitimate successor to that website and people mean to link
| to you.
|
| So you come up higher in search.
|
| I've used this to be the first or second result on google. And
| certainly on the first page of results.
|
| It overcomes downranking for being a new domain nobody links to.
|
| Google has its own criteria for evaluating whether your page is
| spam or a scam, and whether you're abusing this to promote spam
| or a scam.
|
| I have a trio of ancient highly ranked domains that I forward to
| a new page for about a year.
|
| They'll hit page one on google within a week or two or three.
|
| After I remove the 301s or recycle those domains, the pages
| usually still come up within the first page of results
| afterwards.
|
| Before you get too horrified here, I did this to bury a
| "competitor" who had registered a similar domain name, stolen my
| entire repo and website from a disgruntled employee, copied all
| my software and copied my webpage word for word trying to drum up
| business on my IP. The whole time they mocked me in email about
| stealing my customers and putting me out of business.
|
| It worked. (Sort of. If you hire them they don't actually have
| any idea how to do what I do.)
|
| I did not do this to scam or phish or what have you. I just did
| this to bump them from #1 on google. Which they got by
| incorporating with a similar business name and registering with a
| similar URL.
|
| They did ultimately manage to shut that business down and disrupt
| it after years of this and I moved on because I have other
| talents and this venture wasn't profitable enough to deal with
| this entity kneecapping me for years and years.
|
| But on my way out, I forwarded all of those domains to a
| reasonable and legitimate website that's in the same line of
| work, resulting in them now dominating the other site in search.
| So I walked away and used this trick one last time to at least
| ensure someone searching for this subject would end up in some
| safe and reasonable hands.
|
| What's my point in sharing this?
|
| It's that the other website has no idea I did this, and has no
| control over it. You might see this and assume the worst about
| the other website.
|
| someone could be doing this to manipulate SEO or search results
| over sites they don't even own. For reasons that might (?) make
| sense or be well intended.
|
| and for reasons that don't, or might even be malicious.
|
| * MULTIPLE edits for clarification
| weinzierl wrote:
| Many good answers for the why, but can and should you do anything
| about it?
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