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What are open redirects?

Many websites use links that redirect their website visitors to another page. Some redirects are left open to any arbitrary destination. These redirects can be abused by spammers to trick web surfers and search engines into following links that seem to be pointing to your website although they redirect to a spammy website.

That means that people who think that they visit your website will be redirected to highly questionable web pages that might contain adult content, viruses, malware or phishing attempts.

Which redirects on your website could be abused?

Spammers are very inventive. According to Google, they have managed to use the redirect spam on a wide range of websites, including the websites of large well-known companies and the websites of small local government agencies.

For example, the following redirection types can be abused:

1. Scripts that redirect users to a file on the server can be abused by spammers. The links on your website could look like this:

http://www.example.com/download.php?url=http://www…
http:///www.example.com/get/pdf/?http://www…

2. Site search result pages with automatic redirect options. If the result pages of your internal site search feature contain an URL variable that sends your website visitors to other pages, spammers might be able to exploit them:

http://www.example.com/search?q=keyword&page=1&url=…

3. Affiliate tracking links. Affiliate tracking links often allow people to direct website visitors to other pages. Spammers might enter their own URLs in the tracking links. Example:

http://www.example.com/track.php?affid=123&url=…

4. Proxy pages. Proxy sites send people through to other websites and they can be abused by spammers:

http://myproxy.example.com/?url…

5. Interstitial pages. Some websites show an interstitial page when users leave a website to let users know that the information found on the link is not under their control. These URLs usually look like this:

http://www.example.com/redirect/http://www…
http://www.example.com/out?http://www…
http://www.example.com/cgi-bin/redirect.cgi?http://www…

How to find out if your website is abused

Even if you find none of the URLs above on your website, your site still may have open redirects. Do the following to check if your website is abused by spammers:

1. Make a site search on Google

Go to Google.com and search for “site:yourdomain.com”. Replace yourdomain.com with your own domain name. If you see web pages that have nothing to do with your website then it’s likely that someone exploits a security hole on your website.

2. Check your web server logs for URL parameters like “=http:” or “=//”. If your redirection URLs get a lot of traffic, this could also be caused by spammers.

3. If you get user complaints about content or malware that you know cannot be found on your website then your website users might have seen your URL before they were redirected to the malware site.

What you can do to protect your website

It’s not easy to to make sure that your redirects aren’t exploited. The reason for that is that an open redirect is not a bug or a security flaw. There are some things that you can do to protect your website:

1. Check the referrer. Your redirect scripts should only work if they area accessed from another web page of your website. The redirect script should not work if the user accesses the script directly or from a search engine.

2. If possible, make sure that the script can only redirect to web pages and files that are on your own websites. You could use a whitelist of allowed destination domains.

3. Use the robots.txt file of your website to exclude search engines from the redirect scripts on your website. That will make your website less attractive for hackers.

4. Add a signature or a checksum to your redirect links so that only you can use the script.

source: axandra.com

Many people who start a website think that it is possible to get high rankings on Google within a few days. Unfortunately, this is not possible. Competition on the Internet is fierce and there are several factors that influence how long it takes until Google lists your website.

How old is your website?

If you have a brand new website then you have to wait. You can submit your website to Google but Google will only index your website if other websites link to your site.

In addition, you have to prove that your website is not spammy. Google has several filters for new websites and you have to earn Google’s trust before your website can get lasting high rankings. A new website can get good rankings for less competitive keywords but it usually takes about 6 months to gain the minimum level of trust that is necessary to get high rankings.

How optimized was your website before?

If you have an old and established website that was blocking search engine robots due to a broken robots.txt file or a bad website navigation then it can be relatively easy to show up in search engines.

If you remove the factors that keep search engine robots from your web pages then search engines will list your website relatively quickly. Of course, this doesn’t work if you have a new site.

How many inbound links does your website have?

If you have an old website that has very few links then it will take longer to get high rankings on Google. If your website has many inbound links, then Google will pick up the optimized pages on your website much quicker. The more quality links your website has, the quicker your optimized web pages will show up in Google’s results.

Which keywords do you target?

This is a very important factor! The more competitive your keyword is, the longer you will have to wait to get high rankings and the more links and optimized pages you need. Start with multiple word keywords that are related to your business and then proceed to the more competitive keywords when your website has good content and inbound links.

Who are your competitors?

If the website that are ranked in the top 10 results for your keyword all have thousands of inbound links and more than thousand pages then it’s not likely that your website will be able to get in the top 10 results if it has 10 inbound links and 20 pages. You can either wait for along time until you get top 10 rankings for that keywords (i.e. when you have a similar amount of pages and inbound links) or you can start with other keywords.

How many days, weeks or months does it take exactly?

Provided that your website has good inbound links and optimized web pages, you can get high rankings on Google within a few months if you have a brand new site and choose a very specific keyword that consists of several words. Old and established sites usually need some weeks for such a keyword.

If you target industry keywords, which usually consist of two or more words, brand new sites usually need six months to a year to get high rankings. An established site might get the same result within 3 months.

Highly competitive one word keywords usually require thousands of good inbound links. A brand new website can need several years to get high rankings for such a competitive keyword and even established sites can sometimes need more than a year.

Google uses a so-called robot to surf the Internet. This robot is a simple software program that parses all web pages that it finds on the Internet and then stores the information it finds in Google’s database. When you search on Google, you’re actually searching the database that has been collected by that robot.

If you want to get high rankings on Google, you must make sure that Google’s robot finds the right information on your website and that the robot writes the right information about your website in Google’s database.

1. Feed the robot: optimize more than one web page

It’s not enough to optimize your home page. You must optimize each page of your website individually. Optimize different pages of your website for different but related keywords so that Google’s robot sees that your website is relevant to the topic. The more pages you optimize the better.

It takes some time to optimize your pages individually for Google but the results are worth the effort. There are no shortcuts to high rankings on Google. If someone promises you a quick solution, be very skeptical.

2. Indulge the robot: optimize the structure of your web page elements

Google’s robot does not see web pages as you can see them in your browser. Google’s robot sees the plain HTML code and it has to get all information from that code.

For that reason, you have to make sure that the HTML code of your pages contains everything in the right places so that Google’s robot can write the right information to Google’s database.

A single web page has many elements that can be read by Google’s robot: The title tag, meta tags, headline tags, links, keywords in the body text, etc. These elements must come in the right order and they must contain your keyword in the right density if you want to get high rankings on Google for that keyword.

3. Guide the robot: optimize the structure of your whole website

In addition to the structure of your web pages, the structure of your whole website influences the rankings of your web pages on Google as well.

A very important aspect is the structure of your website navigation and the internal links. Your website should have easy to follow text links to every page on your website that you want search engines to see.

If your website has a poor design or if it does not link to all pages of your site, then Google’s robot will skip these pages. If you design your website in Flash or if you put most of your web page content in images then Google’s robot won’t be able to read most of your content.

If you make it as easy as possible for Google’s robot to index your web pages then you will get the best possible rankings. Optimizing your web pages takes some work but it will help you to get high rankings on Google, more customers and more sales.

Check out Web Links Directory for an extra backlink!

This post is about a site from a friend of me (Rasim) called Easy Submits. It is a free semi automated directory submission service and is working very easy. If you are a fanatic directory submitter, you know it takes time to submit your site to many directories! That is exactly what Rasim thought and this submitter came out! Great!

I tried it and it really works great, you are signed up within seconds and can start submitting your site with descriptions etc to many directories. The only thing you have to do is filling in CAPTCHA codes from the directories!

Give it a look and try it out =)

The words that are used in the links to your website have an effect on the search engine rankings of your website for these keywords. For example, if very many websites use the word “blue widget” to link to your website, it is likely that your website will get a high ranking on Google for the keyword “blue widget”.

How many keywords does Google consider?

It’s absolutely certain that Google considers the words in the links to your site. The question is, how many words or characters does Google count in a link? Is there an optimal length for text links? Blogger Shaun Anderson did a test to find the answer.

The test set-up

Shaun Anderson created a long text link with 50 nonsense words. Each of the nonsense words was 6 characters long. For example, he might have used a link like this:

wergsd woivsd mliwdc woiuby 3245sc plorxc werxcd …

Then he added that link to the home page of a website that has good rankings on Google.

After some time, Shaun did a search for a keyword that the linked website ranked number one for and added the nonsense words to the search. By doing so, Google would only list the site in the search results if links to the site contained the nonsense word.

For example, if a website has a number one ranking for “buy used cars in dallas” then the website will only be returned by Google for “buy used cars in dallas wergsd” if Google has indexed a link with the text “wergsd” that points to the website.

The result: the perfect length seems to be 55 characters

55 limitOut of the 50 words in the link text, Google counted eight. Everything after the eighth word was ignored. Eight words that consist of six characters make 48 characters. The seven spaces between these six words add up to a total of 55 characters.

What does this mean for your website?

You should make sure that the important keywords come in the first 55 characters of the links that point to your website.

As many websites use the title of a web page to link to it, you should also consider the way you write your web page titles. If your important keywords are at the beginning of your web page titles, chances are that these keywords will also be used in the links to your site.

According to the article in Google’s blog, Google analyzes more than 200 signals (we call them ‘ranking factors’) to specify the position of a web page in the search results:

“Given the user’s query, over 200 signals (including the analysis of the site’s content and inbound links as mentioned above) are applied to return the most relevant results to the user.”

It’s a simple two-step process

Getting high rankings on Google is a simple two-step process:

1. You must optimize your web page contents so that Google can find out what your website is about. Optimize your web pages for your keywords so that Google knows that your website is relevant to these keywords and your topic.

2. Other websites must confirm that your website is about that topic. That’s what inbound links are for.

It’s as simple as that. If your website passes Google’s analysis of all ranking factors, it will get a top 10 ranking.