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View Full Version : Redirecting traffic from one site to another?



Vivid Color Zack
01-20-2010, 01:15 PM
Hey guys,

Just got a weird phone call from a customer - they said they typed in my web address and got redirected to a competitors website - then they said while they were logged in to my site, they were again redirected without even clicking anything.

If anyone has a minute would you mind going to the site on my sig. and just seeing if anything weird happens? Maybe leave the window open for a few minutes and let me know if it redirects?

I was told the customer was using explorer, and we operate on apple products over here. I can't test this on my own.

If something is going on I would really like to find out for sure, or maybe a customer is just having some difficulty on their end.

Thanks in advance... This is troubling if it's for real.

Spider
01-20-2010, 01:39 PM
I have it open right now - www. vividcolor.com

It's been open for a few minutes.

No problems - went straight there, opened quickly.

I waited a bit, clicked on a few links from the menu. All worked according to expectations.

Am closing it now. It closed without difficulty.

Nothing amiss, as I could see.

HP laptop, Windows XP.

phanio
01-20-2010, 03:14 PM
Any idea what browser your customer was using? Might be somethign with their browser. Or, even their internet connection - if they have a slow connection - may be some links that they clicked where just taking a lot of time to load.

Vivid Color Zack
01-20-2010, 03:38 PM
I'm thinking it's an issue on the customers end - they were using explorer. Though she seems like she's fairly computer savvy, and I wouldn't expect such a basic mistake from her.

I have checked with a few friends and they report no problems either. Thanks for helping me out guys.

KristineS
01-20-2010, 05:04 PM
I have it open in Firefox and it's fine. Same thing with Explorer. Wonder if it was a virus or something on the customer's end.

Spider
01-20-2010, 05:40 PM
Tell you something I have occasionally found - when a page loads slowly, so that the browser is open, the site has been found but you are faced with a blank browser page (perhaps taken on the background color of the site but no content appears yet) - clicking the surface of the page can actually activate a link in that location on the page but not yet in view.

Then you have no idea where you are going and why.

I'm guessing, but if you have Adwords ads under your curser at that moment, you could very easily find yourself on a competitor's site.

vangogh
01-20-2010, 06:45 PM
Seems ok to me too. I'm looking in both Safari and FF on a Mac.

If it was only that they ended up a competitor site when they thought they were clicking to your site I would think it likely user error and no big deal. Strange though that they were redirected to the other site while logged in, but not doing anything. It's also a little strange that of all the sites to get redirected to, they were "randomly" redirected to a competitor.

Do you know which site they were redirected to? You don't have to post it, but you can send it to me in a PM.

It's possible that your customer picked up a virus. Some will redirect you to sites they control. It's also possible for search results to get hijacked so you think you're clicking one site and going to another.

In this case your customer typed the url into the address bar. One possibility is that the browser filled in the competitor site as your url was being typed. That happens to me all the time. Assuming the competitor site had been visited in that browser it's URL is in the browser history. That doesn't explain being redirected when not clicking on anything though, there is probably an explanation where human error is the cause there too.

It's probably not anything to worry about unless more people tell you the same thing happened to them. Keep testing on different computers and see if you can reproduce the problem. If you can't reproduce then this is probably human error, but it's something to keep an eye out for.

Vivid Color Zack
01-20-2010, 10:21 PM
^ Thanks Vangogh, you're probably right. The more I thought about it the competitor starts with the same letter as my company - that gives it away right? - but she probably just let it auto fill the rest, then maybe was just confused when the same thing may or may not have happened again later.

All your help is appreciated guys I was freaking out a little for nothing.

vangogh
01-20-2010, 11:16 PM
Glad you're not freaking out anymore, though it's totally understandable. It probably was her error, but still a good idea to pay a little closer attention just in case someone else has the problem too.

TmasterMind
01-21-2010, 06:59 AM
This has happened to me as well and as I observe, the return of the error comes with a 404 and thus, it can be either helpful by itself or redirects to a helpful page. The best result so far for any link popularity for broken links be passed on to the page of your choice. As soon as the search engine sent the error code, it treats the page as a dead page and will eventually remove it. Still, this should be noticed carefully to prevent losing of traffic.

dynocat
01-21-2010, 08:42 PM
Fine here on both Firefox and IE.

cathleen
02-06-2010, 02:42 AM
The reason to redirect traffic is to maintain as much of your existing search engine placement and credit for back links as you possibly can. If your old site existed for any length of time, you’ve inevitably built up links to your content from other sites on the web. In addition, your content has probably started to bubble itself into Google, Yahoo, and MSN Live results and, depending on how much work you’ve done, might even be ranking well for certain keywords. The bottom line is, you want to minimize the loss of visitors and search engine ranking as much as you possibly can.

vangogh
02-06-2010, 03:31 AM
All true, but it has nothing to do with the issue in this thread. Did you by chance read the original post?