Can sites consisting entirely of 301 redirects to my site harm me?

[surfgatinho]

I've noticed a few sites, all with fairly random German sounding domain names that consist entirely of redirects to one of my sites.

Google has them indexed (exactly like my page), but each page is a 301 to my site. And there are a few thousand bages indexed for each of them.

I'm not sure I like this.

Can't say it seems to affect my ranking, but should I be worried? And what would be the best course of action if I want to raise it with Google?

[aristotle]

I'm not sure I understand this. Wouldn't all traffic to the other site, whether it comes from google or anywhere else, be re-directed to your site?

[surfgatinho]

I'm not sure I understand this. Wouldn't all traffic to the other site, whether it comes from google or anywhere else, be re-directed to your site?

Yes, it is.
I have no idea what the motivation behind it is - except maybe they love my site :)

However, If I do a site:othersite.com search all the pages are featured with titles / descriptions. If I click on them it goes straight through to my site - and the headers show it being a 301

The reason I spotted these sites is they were appearing in my Google Webmaster tools dashboard under "Links to my site"

[Shaddows]

Have you fetched as googlebot?

Is there a cached page?

There are two attach vectors I can think of off the top of my head (and I am not a security professional). One is neg SEO of the 301 site, which is then pointed at you.

The other is a near clone of your site used for hosting embedded crap of various forms, hidden from the world by 301 to your site. Cloaking shows only G the content, all other UA or IPs being 301'd. I'm not sure that would affect you though, as G would not know it is being redirected.

[surfgatinho]

Yes, there are cached pages - but when I look at them they are cached versions of my site.

Out of interest I have just added it to my Google Webmaster Tools console - I could do this as it had a 301 to my verification file.

When I do a fetch as Google from here it comes up with "redirected" as the status. Doesn't seem like there is any cloaking going on.

All a bit strange really. Especially considering there are 4 domains doing this...

[not2easy]

I found a site doing that to a site of mine last summer. GSC showed thousands of links incoming (it is a small site, under 50 pages), and before I even tried to do anything about it Google apparently figured it out and the site was gone. Not only the links, the site itself could not be found typing in the domain. I don't know how long it had gone on before I noticed it, I seldom check for "Links to my site" in GSC.

[lucy24]

Isn't the underlying idea that they gain status by having good content (i.e. yours) and then after this has been established, they change over to their own crummy content?