Link tracking scripts could be harming your site

302 redirects on link exchanges and referral sites

[Whitey]

I have just noticed on Google, a cache of our content appearing against the URL of another sites tracking script URL. This is seen by Google as being the other website's content, with duplicate content implications for our site, potentially invoking the duplicate content filter on our site and tanking our results.

This script is producing a 302 redirect, which may cause Google to see our original site as the duplicate content party and also hijack our PR [ i believe ].

It looks like this: www.referringsite.com/links/goto.cfm?LinkID=123

To find scripts that are doing this do a search like this, using the site command tool: site:referringsite.com mysite

Fortunately, the webmaster co operated, and the offending link pages have been taken down [ everyone else's included ] , but he denies that the script wasn't working properly, saying it was Google's fault. Shame, because the site would otherwise been a good site to receive links from.

Some webmasters may not realise their tracking scripts are potentially causing damage to others sites, and some may be doing it on purpose to do harm or steal. Is anyone else experiencing this on referring sites, and has it done damage to you?

Were you aware of this effecting your results?

Also how did you report it to Google [ see [webmasterworld.com...] ] or the webmaster concerned?

[edited by: Whitey at 3:16 am (utc) on Nov. 9, 2006]

[g1smd]

I have seen several examples of this in the last month. They are hard to find, not because Google has fixed the problem, but because they have made them harder to find.

Yes, the webmaster always blames Google for indexing the URLs rather than the webmaster fixing things so that the URLs cannot be indexed.

[Halfdeck]

FURL's redirects outrank my original pages and are possibly turning one of my sites supplemental, though who knows for sure.