Ask HN: Why buy domains and 301 redirect them to me?

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.

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:

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%2ByynaFOXWYlxaePF9KdRQ0qGUJkfm1F1aK2m3VEx6idlvWlb5go%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&rtt_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=e5052200af7e27a5&ts=145&x=0"

[dead]

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.

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.