I've seen many websites, specially social networks, allowing their users to have on their profiles a link to their own website/blog, but in reality they all are using redirects.<p>I wonder why are they doing this? I imagine it's because is a cheap way to get links with "valuable" anchor texts, so I decided to try it myself.<p>I'd like to make sure this is not going to hurt my SEO.<p>Side question, what is happening with my page rank when using window.location.replace(redirectURL)?<p>PS. I am sorry if anything I just said/ask doesn't make sense.
Upon clicking a link, you're sending a 404 status code message to browsers/user agents. Search engine crawlers likely aren't going to follow past that.<p>So everything you link to appears to be a broken link, and the pages are all about links.<p>What kind of quality score might a search engine give a page that's completely filled with broken links? Probably not too high.