Welcome to Black Hat (SEO)

February 2, 2007 – 6:50 am

Black Hat SEOThat was not exactly what I expected to read in the comments after blogging about unexpected redirect page rank. But I guess one of the best and fastest ways to learn is from your own mistakes. But in my mistake there may be a lesson for any one.

It started with me trying to implement .htaccess redirects for links on one of my website, which is also powered by WordPress. As a result of implementing these redirects, I ended up with few that matched exactly the permalinks that have been on the website for about four months. Here is an exampple:

www.mysite.com/widget- existed before I started to implement the redirects.

Then I have created following .htaccess redirect:

redirect /widget http://www.myaffiliatelink.com

So as you can see this created a problem, because the redirect was created after my page was indexed in Google. Visitors who found my page in Google or other search engines, were being directed straight to a merchant site as soon as .htaccess redirect was created. This also explains why a link redirect had a page rank next to it when I checked the visual page rank. But this also a practice that falls into so called “Black Hat SEO”, and should be avoided.

I guess anyone using WordPress can run into a similar problem. Just make sure when creating .htaccess redirects you do not duplicate already existing permalinks and you will be fine.

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