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Redirecting bad backlinks somewhere else?

by websupportguy
4 replies
I am trying to get my head around the idea of being able to redirect bad backlinks away from my site, and what would happen if I did that? The method I am thinking of using is:

Code:
RewriteCond %{http_referer} ^http://([^.]+.)*(somesite).com
RewriteRule ^(.+) http://othersite.com [R=301,L]
(or something similar)

My question (other than "is this code correct?") is this, if Google follows that backlink in the future and sees this redirect, will it say the target page no longer exists? Or just that the backlink now points somewhere else? Google will still be able to index the target page and it will still exist in sitemaps.

Why am I wanting to do this? Because there are some bad backlinks I just cannot get removed, and they're hurting my SEO. I could use disavow, but because I've not been warned about them and I've not been able to contact the webmasters concerned (no contact details), disavowal might not be a good idea at this point.
#301 #backlinks #bad #htaccess #redirecting
  • Profile picture of the author phpg
    First, what it has to do with HTTP referer? Google bot will not send referer in the HTTP header, and this rule will be ignored. Then, when google finds redirect, it'll follow it and will think that "the backlink now points somewhere else".
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  • Profile picture of the author websupportguy
    Maybe I was not completely clear in my question. Let me try again.

    If I was able to detect an inbound backlink (e.g. to my homepage) from another website, using HTACCESS, and redirect only that backlink site's traffic to somewhere else, what would Google make of that when it it indexes that link?

    The use of HTTP referrer is server side on my site, so that the backlink site's traffic does not go to my home page, but is redirected somewhere else. When Google (or anyone else) follows the link, they will end up at "somewherelse.com".

    So my question is, does Google then index that as a backlink to "somewherelse.com" or is it still considered to be a backlink to my home page?
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  • Profile picture of the author phpg
    It seems that you don't understand how HTTP referrer works. It doesn't just magically detect where the user or bot came from. It reads this information from HTTP headers sent by the user (or bot). And googlebot doesn't send this information in HTTP headers.

    does Google then index that as a backlink to "somewherelse.com" -YES

    or is it still considered to be a backlink to my home page - NO
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  • Profile picture of the author Rideem3
    You really can't do this the way you want to.
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