Redirects

[mrzzz28]

I'm not sure what a "sneaky redirect' is. but here's my question. I know a site that a competitor has that uses some sort of redirect to get high search engine rankings for various words. When you click on the link it takes you to that site's home page and not to the page in the search engine. I've seen several such pages for his site.Is this against the TOS of the engines or is it ok? I'm thinking he may use something like Targeted Traffic Machine.Thank you in advance.How do you know he uses the redirect to get high search engine placment?Perhaps the search engines are giving stale results and you are being taken to his custom 404 page or a permenent redirect. Both of which are perfectly acceptable.I checked his 404 page by typing in some pages that aren't there like 1.html, etc and got a standard 404 return page. That's not what's happening. In addition, the name of the page is about four or five words, which is what the smart pages often generate.I'm not sure smart pages are against the TOS as I see lots of sites using them and have been for years. But I'm just curious as to what he's doing.He may not be doing anything wrong.Look at the google cache of the page that redirects you,. If it contains something that looks like relevant information then its probably a permenant redirect.If its a page full of keywords and no decent content then he is breaking tos.I did that and it redirected me too. I did catch a peek at it and it was javascript and said "weber" aw weber or something like that.I had a competitor do the same thing once. I can't recall what I did to get it to stop, but I believe I just kept clicking the [esc] button until I got it to stop on the rogue page. Once I did, in my case, their page was full of keywords, phrases, content, etc. It was all geared toward high SERP performance and was totally irrelevant to a human visitor. They redesigned their entire site after being bought out (after going bankrupt), otherwise I'd send you a link to it so you could see what I am referring to.Are those pages against the TOS of the search engines even when they only link to the same site?Sure they are. If they aren't useful to humans, and their only purpose is to feed the spiders, then most likely they are going to have a negative impact on site performance (when the site is B4NZ0R3D!11!) For more help, note the following Google Guidelines:- "Don't employ cloaking or sneaky redirects"- "Avoid "doorway" pages created just for search engines..."