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Thank you for your response! We have combed through the code and server activity and there has been nothing changed recently (that we have noticed thus far). However, we will definitely keep you updated.

Thanks!

Thank you for the response! We have considered some of these angles but it has been tough to pinpoint the issue. It looks like our spam report took care of it for now but we will keep you guys updated. This is also happening to some competitors so we are all leaning toward this being a serious case of black hat SEO.

Thanks again!

Hello!

We could use some assistance diagnosing an issue. In order to avoid asking a convoluted question, I will try to break it down below:

1. A random foreign site is hacked and a subdirectory is added that is completely irrelevant to the root.

a). i.e. http://www.um.org/prom_dresses/

2. http://www.um.org/prom_dresses/ is just a phishing prom dress page

3. When you search "prom dress shop", the website that used to rank first (for good reason) was www.promdressshop.com.

4. www.promdressshop.com's home page has now been replaced by:  um.org/prom_dresses/ – who is using prom dress shop's title tag and meta description.

How is it possible that this hacked page (on um.org) is not only ranking above us, but is also starting to replace www.promdressshop.com's pages in search results. We do not believe www.promdressshop.com has been hacked but are open to any ideas.

Please let me know if you would like any additional info. Thanks in advance!

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Hi Corey,

I appreciate the you taking the time to read through our questions and provide some insight.  Thanks for all of your help!

P.S. we're also from Chicago.  So if I see you out and about, remind me that I owe you a brew.

Thanks,

Drew and the rest of the Logical Media Group team

Hi Corey,

Thanks for taking the time to read through this and provide a response!

I'm happy to hear that you think the latter is indeed a better method.  You say that chaining redirects causes other issues as well.  Do you mind elaborating on this?  I just watched a Matt Cutts video and he does confirm that you should avoid chaining too many redirects because Googlebot could actually stop following them at some point (sounds like around 4 or 5).

It's also interesting to hear that you mine for this situation during your auditing process.  Do you do this by looking through the .htaccess file or is there a tool you use?

Thanks again for taking the time to help us out with this!  Any additional feedback is greatly appreciated!

Thanks,

The Logical Media Group Team

Just to be clear, this is for one unique page on a website.  Also, please see my diagram attached.

Let's say that a page's URL was originally /original.  So, you optimize the page for a new keyword (keyword 1), and therefore change the URL to /keyword-1.  A 301 redirect would then be placed...

• /original > /keyword-1

However, let's say 6 months down the road you realize that the keyword you optimized the page for (keyword 1) just isn't working.  You research for a new keyword, and come up with (keyword 2).  So, you'd like to rename the page's URL to /keyword-2.

After placing a redirect from the current page (keyword 1) to the 'now' new page (keyword 2), it would look like this...

• /original > /keyword-1 > /keyword-2

We know that making a server go through more than one redirect slows the server load time, and even more 'link-juice' is lost in translation.

Because of this, would it make sense to remove the original redirect and instead place redirects like this?

1. /original > /keyword-2
2. /keyword-1 > /keyword-2

To me, this would make the most sense for preserving SEO.  However, I've read that removing 301 redirects can cause user issues due to browsers caching the now 'removed' redirect.  Even if this is ideal for SEO, could it be more work than it's worth?

Does anyone have any experience/input on this?  If so, I greatly appreciate your time!

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