GoDaddy, 302 random redirect and Google
Xworder used to hold the top (2nd-3rd place) position in Google search results for find words from letters. It’s still at the 3rd place on Bing, but Google now only mentions Xworder at the bottom of the 2nd page.
It took me a while to understand what’s going on. Apparently, the GoDaddy server that hosts Xworder issues “random redirects”:
Google hates those redirects and when it sees them often, it stops indexing the pages and demotes their search ranking.
You can find lots of blog posts describing this issue and blaming GoDaddy; many people are abandoning GoDaddy because of it.
Those redirects are part of implementation of a threat management system. They are used to analyze traffic patterns in order to automatically detect DDOS and malware probe traffic from botnets. The redirects are issued whenever the site is first visited from the particular IP within a certain time interval (“once per session”).
Most likely, the TMS is being implemented by a 3rd party vendor, not by GoDaddy internally. There are some reports that the same redirect behavior has been observed at other hosting providers too.
Of course it sucks that the people who designed that TMS never considered its impact on SEO.
But what really sucks is Google. A chain of 2 redirects breaks Google!? What’s up with that?
I’m guessing it’s because of the way Google implements redirect loop detection. When they see a redirect back to where they’ve been before, they consider it a loop. But it’s not a loop.
GoDaddy says they are working on this (no ETA), but shouldn’t Google be working on this too?
