Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hello, I have never heard of Google penalizing anyone for such a thing, and would proceed with what you're wanting to do there. Hope this helps. Zack

Hi there, so just to confirm - you have a page that is redirected to your homepage (I'm assuming not with a JavaScript redirect) and your Google Analytics is reporting that page is getting traffic from 12-reasons-for-seo.com? This sounds like Measurement Protocol spam, I'll explain why I think that based on the way GA works but to reassure you - if that's the case then all it's messing with is your analytics. Google doesn't use Google Analytics data to inform search rankings - in terms of "bounces" Google just uses data about whether a searcher, on a Google page, clicks one result and then comes back to the search results page and clicks on another. Google Analytics records page views based on receiving a message from some JavaScript code that runs on (ideally) every page of your website If the page is redirected before it loads (as in not a JavaScript redirect) that code won't have time to run, so Google Analytics won't see you having a page view on that page, even if someone tried to access it Measurement Protocol is a way you can manually send hits to Google, it's a way of recording all kind of things that are difficult to reflect in terms of pageviews and events on your site (i.e. someone bought a product over the phone or someone viewed the same page on your app) Anyone can get your GA ID by looking at your page code and once they have that, they can send fake pageviews to your Google Analytics. If it's true that all of these pageviews are landing on a page that doesn't even load before it's redirected (that's important, because if it's a JavaScript redirect your GA code might have time to run) then the best solution for this is probably to find what all of these hits have in common (sounds like you've already found a couple things) then create a Google Analytics filter for your reporting view which excludes this traffic as specifically as possible (to reduce risk of accidentally dropping real traffic)

Thanks, Ed. I see your point, but I haven't seen a lot of viral activity when I've guest authored on good sites in the past. So maybe I'll self-publish and try to promote links.  If I don't get any links I can always take the article down and submit it. Any additional thoughts?

Hi Lysarden, Good point. No not in my opinion. If your content is valuable to your target audience and has an additional value for them its very much OK like this. I can think of some kind of summary with curated links as being something very helpful actually. Its a sign of quality contents that is also links to other (authoritative) sources. Some might visit these links but thats OK, thats part of the game and also what they are supposed to do actually. But they will come back and stick to your blog/content if its worth something for them. You will pass equity juice to the sites you link to and yes you will help them rank (but they would probably would do anyway also without your link as I think of them of being authoritative sites in the given topic already), but you will also position your blog posting topic wise in the right area and again to link to (maybe not to many) good authoritative sites in the corresponding field is good practice, something you should do. If your posting is a kind of list of helpful links for this topic also many links pointing out would be OK. Cheers, Cesare

I agree with you Donald, all depends of what kind of link are we talking about 10 links from wikipedia ( same site )are better than 10 links from blogs that nobody knows. In the other hands 10 reputable sites linking to your site such as wall street journal, national geographic or site like that are better than 10 links of wikipedia

More is obviously always better, but you should definitely milk the opportunity to your best powers. Having a reputable site mention you multiple times is a really great thing.