If you have an affliate program, it could for outbound email campaigns to sell your product.
Ask HN: Why buy domains and 301 redirect them to me?
101–110 of 135 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why buy domains and 301 redirect them to me?
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 t…
Our service testlocal.ly can grab screenshots for you from different countries really quickly if you want a free check.
Oh hey, I've used your site before. Thanks for setting it up!
One quick point of feedback: The "Learn more about our features and pricing" button appears to be broken, at least on Chrome Android.
The click gets intercepted by the registration form somehow, like by some type of overly-broad selector targeting "form button" or similar.
Instead of being taken to the pricing page, it takes me to the next step of the form, which I don't want to fill out before seeing the pricing.
Re: Ask HN: Why buy domains and 301 redirect them to me?
#103I 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 mor…
Very interesting, someone did that to a project of mine 10 years ago.
They registered $my_projectname.org and loaded my site in a full screen iframe with ads over it.
Traffic was up to 500 users per day that I was never able to monetise, I doubt they got a lot from their iframe either.
But they beat me and some other similar sites on SEO very hard, very fast and I never quite figured out how.
I ended up serving a white page to that referer.
Re: Ask HN: Why buy domains and 301 redirect them to me?
#104That is a really good problem to have. If you know that is happening with HTTP you can redirect those requests, based upon origin, to a honeypot of your choosing. It’s free traffic you didn’t have to work for to use as you wish without disruption to your business requirements. You can use that traffic to experiment with new features under experimental branding, AB testing, and more.
The malicious website can stop the Referer header from being sent by setting the Referrer-Policy header to "no-referrer". Also, redirects apparently wouldn't include a Referer header any way, according to kbolino's comment.
Re: Ask HN: Why buy domains and 301 redirect them to me?
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I would expect the certificate mismatch to prevent this.
The certificate mismatch does not play any role in this SEO tactic. It just is not a factor.
Re: Ask HN: Why buy domains and 301 redirect them to me?
#106As 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…
one another scenario is that if you open the domain from browser, they will do 301 redirect, but for traffic coming from Google/search engine, they will show their actual content.
If this is done with SEO in mind, at first they will also do a redirect for Google Bot.
Then they build links to their domains. Once it has more backlinks than the real domain, the redirect is removed.
Re: Ask HN: Why buy domains and 301 redirect them to me?
#107IMHO you should take action ASAP - at the cost of sacrificing all traffic coming from them. Regardless of their endgame, I'd just detect the HTTP referer and redirect back to them: crawlers and browsers will detect the redirect loop and happily complain about their domain. This will render their redirects ineffective, eg. any phishing attempt will have broken links.
This is preferable rather than returning 404, 403, or warning users something fishy is going on - since anything you return from your site will have browsers and crawlers complaining about your site, and your URL/contents might suffer penalties or deindexing as a result.
Re: Ask HN: Why buy domains and 301 redirect them to me?
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
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!
> I still never use 301s for that reason. Things may have changed, but I dare not try! I use 301 for http:->https: redirects because (a) I doubt we're going back, (b) it prevents some cleartext leaks (like the Host header), and (c) it is slightly cheaper. > we never figured out how to get the browser to re-learn the responses for those pages without drastic measures. If you control the target URL it is easy, just red…
> If you control the target URL it is easy, just redirect back. Seriously: The browser won't loop
Just uh... don't do this if you have a CDN infront of your site. We had an incident where Cloudfront cached the 301's in both directions
Re: Ask HN: Why buy domains and 301 redirect them to me?
#109Re: Ask HN: Why buy domains and 301 redirect them to me?
#110Not a lawyer. Your claim to copyright the term used by your SaaS depends on the website you registered, unless you officially copyrighted the term. Someone having all those websites can also claim the copyright, or claim you didn't enforce it by asking the other websites to be removed.