Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi there. There are a number of ways in which this is a bad idea - as others have pointed out. But in particular: What you are doing may manipulate the "bounce rate" you see in analytics, but won't affect the % of users who return immediately to the search results after landing on your page - which we know is one of the ways Google evaluates the quality of their own search results Going via an interstitial page is on its own not great UX, but having a delay on that page just makes it more likely that a user will give up and leave immediately - and also have a greater chance of remembering your site as being a poor UX and be less likely to return At an overarching level, there's nothing wrong with having external links off a page. This is normal and expected on any site. I would say you should put all your efforts that are currently going into manipulating this behaviour and these metrics into improving the user experience of your site to make it better for the people who do find it. I hope that helps.