Ask HN: Why buy domains and 301 redirect them to me?
41–50 of 135 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why buy domains and 301 redirect them to me?
#42As 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…
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.
Re: Ask HN: Why buy domains and 301 redirect them to me?
#43Whatever 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".
Re: Ask HN: Why buy domains and 301 redirect them to me?
#44Can 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.
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: {"…
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.
Re: Ask HN: Why buy domains and 301 redirect them to me?
#45I 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.
The referer is the site that sent the user to the redirect, not the redirect itself. You cannot detect 301s from the destination only.
Re: Ask HN: Why buy domains and 301 redirect them to me?
#46Whatever their play, detect and drop the redirects. Good job on noticing it early on!
You cannot detect a 301 redirect when you're only in control of the destination.
Re: Ask HN: Why buy domains and 301 redirect them to me?
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
Couldn't the attacker evade that by sending Referrer-Policy: no-referrer with their redirect?
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...
Neither the Origin nor the Referer headers have anything to do with a 301 redirect.
Re: Ask HN: Why buy domains and 301 redirect them to me?
#48As 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…
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
Re: Ask HN: Why buy domains and 301 redirect them to me?
#49I 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.
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.
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.
Re: Ask HN: Why buy domains and 301 redirect them to me?
#50Check 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