How A New Yahoo! Patent Could Hurt Your URL Redirection Plans

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

If you put enough thought into your URLs at the beginning of your website planning then you likely will not have to redirect them to new URLs later. Of course, you could do all the planning in the world and still have to redirect. Sometimes business plans change. You could purchase a new web property and decide that it makes sense to integrate that property into your own site, or take pages from your existing site and spin them off to be a part of the new site you now own. All sorts of things could happen.

At any rate, you need to redirect some of your URLs. What should you think about in terms of that redirection? What sorts of things do you need to consider?

Webmasters have been talking about these issues ever since the first URL redirection occurred. Now, however, it seems there is a reason to codify all the important criteria from a search engine perspective, or some of them anyways. Yahoo! has filed for a patent on a method to determine whether two URLs are owned by the same person if one of them is redirecting to another. You can read about the patent here.

One question to ask is, Why would a search engine patent such a method? What’s in it for them? And the answer is – quite a lot, actually.

For the search engine, it’s a matter of reputation. If there are millions of web pages using a 301 redirect and some of those pages are spammy in nature or pass off malicious malware to people who unwittingly visit those pages then that could cause searchers to lose trust in the search engine. Therefore, it makes sense for a search engine to be concerned about redirects. But what criteria are they using to determine whether or not to show a web page in their search results if it redirects to another page, or is redirected to from another page? Furthermore, how do they cut down on the duplicate content considering that there are so many redirects to crawl?

One obvious answer is Whois information. If you just purchased a new web property and you want to redirect it to one that you own, or vice-versa, then you might wait to perform your redirect until the Whois data has been changed. Knowing that the two web pages are owned by the same person could make a big difference to the search engines.

But sometimes that isn’t possible. If you purchase portions of a web business and the rest of that business is retained by the previous owner then the entire website isn’t going to change ownership. Maybe you’re just going to redirect some of the page on that URL to your website. Changing Whois isn’t going to help you, is it?

In that case, the search engines are going to look at other criteria to determine if there may be an ownership connection between two pages. One criteria is URL overlap. Are there letters and characters in each URL that are in common? That could be a clue, as in, for example, blog.example.com and example.com/blog.

Another thing the search engines might look at is IP address overlap. Do the two websites share an IP address, or IP block? In other words, are they on the same server or separate servers?

URL-anchor text overlap is another clue. For instance, if a large number of inbound links use “search engine optimization” as anchor text and the URL being redirected is searchengineoptimizationjournal.com, that will be a clue. If I attempt to redirect this URL to something like girlsgonewilderthanwild.com, that will likely send up a red flag to a search engine.

The search engines will also consider the spamminess of each site involved in a redirect. If either of them look spammy to start with, that’s not going to fare well for either of them.

And finally, page titles. If the page titles of the two pages involved in the redirect are similar or have some overlap then that could be an indication that they are co-owned and offer a viable redirect.

Before you start redirecting your URLs, you might want to do an analysis of your redirection plans to see if you could be sending up red flags to any of the search engines. If so, fix your known issues before you do the redirect. You could save yourself a lot of SEO troubles and headaches down the road.