Can redirects influence your search engine rankings?

Published: January 16, 2019

Yes, according to official statements from Google, sneaky redirects are a negative ranking signal. While there are many reasons to redirect searchers from one URL to another, redirects aimed at deceiving search engines, or for cloaking reasons (showing different content to searchers than crawlers), can result in penalties:

“Some examples of sneaky redirects include:

– Search engines shown one type of content while users are redirected to something significantly different.

– Desktop users receive a normal page, while mobile users are redirected to a completely different spam domain.” source