A recent case of truly misguided use of redirects I was subject to on the PayPal site made me think how often this actually happens.
Redirects, dirty URLs and other Internet addressing issues that break the findability and user experience seem to be commonplace now.
They are really hurting your bottom line if you ask me.
Using trap doors and polluting addresses
It’s a Trap Wallpaper by TheGreatBrandino on deviantART
Imagine that in real life, potential customers enter your store. But instead of welcoming them and serving them right away, a trap door opens up below them and sends them sliding down to the cellar.
Imagine that your business card does not simply display your address but instead adds a lot of cryptic information to it or even downright gibberish that even burrows the actual street name or city below it.
Ludicrous, isn’t it? Yet on the Web it happens all the time, even, or especially on large and reputable sites, not just murky back alley ones.
Using trap doors – PayPal leading by bad example
I actually ignored most redirect issues as minor annoyances until recently PayPal decided to redesign their interface and thus broke the site. All I see now when I log in to PayPal is this:
This moment never stops and the animation runs circles until I give up and close the tab completely. Luckily I’m more or less a Web-savvy user so I know why the PayPal site stopped working. I’ve even told them repeatedly, explaining what the solution should be, but to no avail.
Their old site had a simple fix for this, which happens to be a decade old best practice. What happens here? Let me show you a very useful Firefox option I’ve been using for several years now:
Go to
Options -> Advanced -> General -> Accessibility
to take a look yourself in case you use Firefox (which I still highly recommend after a decade of usage).
There is a checkbox I checked that says “Warn me when websites try to redirect or reload the page”. This is the trap door protection I use. Why could it possibly happen? Well, that’s simple. You may want to visit
site1.com/legit/content/
while a sneaky redirect instead takes you to
site2.com/illegal-warez-download.rar
Even if you don’t download anything that might be a virus, your employer could notice that you visit illegal sites during your working time. It doesn’t have to be that bad. It’s a simple precaution that saves you a lot of time and eliminates many annoyances prevalent on the Web usually.
I just prefer to end up where I originally intended to, not where somebody else wants me to.
This is not completely fool proof. Some redirects, probably server-side ones work despite that but that’s life. Safety is always relative. Still you don’t move around recklessly and take unnecessary risks.
Older Opera versions had similar optional protective measures. Sadly I can’t find the feature in the latest version of the browser. The widely used browsers from the well-known mega-corporations do not offer similar protection as far as I know but you may correct me if I err.
So what’s the solution and best practice I mentioned earlier? Offer a real clickable link. That’s it.
No high-tech voodoo needed. Just offer an alternative for users who have disabled sneaky redirects. Until now PayPal wants me to compromise my browser security to make their site work. It’s been a month since I sent them the bug report but they haven’t been able to put a simple link to make it work safely again.
In this case, I’m forced to use PayPal despite this vulnerability but I welcome clients who are willing to use competing services like Skrill, for example, which are cheaper and safer by comparison. What happens when other websites I don’t know or I don’t have to rely on try to pull the trap door under me? Well, I just stop right there and never return in most cases. In severe cases I might add a negative WOT (Web of Trust) review.
Polluting addresses – Google leading by bad example
When you think of polluted Internet addresses, you don’t have to look farther than Google, the search traffic monopolist every webmaster loves to hate. As a searcher, you can simply switch to better search engines like DuckDuckGo or Blekko, but as a website owner you have to deal with it. Look what happens when I try to use Google.com from a clean browser.
I delete cookies after each session, including hidden Flash cookies Google is adding on my computer.
And each time they try to localize my search usage. I’m based in Germany so I have to use Google.de in German. There is an option to use it in English by clicking another link in the footer to search on Google.com. How does the actual URL look then? Now take a look at this:
https://www.google.com/search?gs_rn=49&gs_ri=psy-ab&cp=8&gs_id=u&xhr=t&q=link+building&pf=p&output=search&sclient=psy-ab&oq=link+bui&gs_l&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_qf.&bvm=bv.71778758,d.ZWU&biw=1239&bih=672&dpr=1
Even though I’m an SEO I have no idea what all this address crap means.
I know there is a Moz post explaining some of these parameters but I won’t look that one up. What I know for sure though is that the only parameter needed to perform my search is “q=link+building” so that a clean URL would look like this:
https://www.google.com/search?q=link+building
You might assume that the results are different or something but no, the result page is completely the same with the exception of some ads that have shifted slightly. This is a great reminder that I need to configure my ad blocking on Google again.
Now compare that to the DuckDuckGo user experience. There I can search the English version right away and the resulting URL looks like this:
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=link+building
That’s just one of the reasons why DDG is my default search engine. I use Google only because I have to, mostly because of my work as a search engine optimizer.
Other sites are even worse than Google. They don’t even let me view the original site but force me to go to the much worse German one. The NBA is one of the most atrocious examples. I tend to forget that and try to visit it every year or two and then vanish for another year again.
Expats and tourists living in or visiting Germany are apparently not allowed to view the English language NBA.com site.
Instead they get redirected to http://www.spox.com/de/sport/ussport/nba/index.html – a completely different site that doesn’t even belong to the NBA.
How URL gibberish may affect bloggers
You might say that nobody cares, even prominent marketing gurus like Seth Godin get away with similarly crappy URLs:
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2014/07/trading-favors.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+typepad%2Fsethsmainblog+%28Seth%27s+Blog%29
Nobody can even see them in most cases:
This is how the link above is saved on Delicious by myself. When you are huge like Google or popular like Seth Godin, you may ignore such details I guess. To most other people and businesses, it’s disadvantageous.
Just see what happens with a similar polluted URL on a far less known blog:
https://threeventures.com/the-universal-navigation-component-a-ui-and-ux-experiment/?utm_content=bufferebcc8&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer
I have never heard of them before and bookmarked them for the first time. Let’s imagine I am a well-known blogger looking for authoritative sources on exactly the topic they cover. Are they an authoritative source? I have no clue. How do I find out? I will check on Topsy whether the link gets shared a lot on Twitter. On Delicious I’m the only person who bookmarked it so I mildly pessimistic. What do I see on Topsy?
Ouch. This is obviously a dead blog. Nobody even cares to tweet about them. Not even the blogger themselves. It’s probably even a scraper site. Let’s just keep on looking for a truly authoritative source. This is, of course, not true, it’s just that I’m a blogger in a hurry and I don’t know the Intertubes that well. I don’t expect that half of the URL is just crap added for the sake of tracking that Topsy can’t digest. I could remove the redundant part and wind up with a clean URL like this:
https://threeventures.com/the-universal-navigation-component-a-ui-and-ux-experiment/
Searching Topsy with the clean URL yields a completely different result:
Not only do I see that 6 people have shared the article on Twitter, but I also discover a familiar face. One of the avatars is none other than @pointblankseo – a great authority in our trade despite or even because of the astoundingly young age:
This is just one example close to home. The point is: many tools and people get confused by polluted URLs. The pollutants above are pretty common for many years. There are new kinds of more obnoxious gibberish that might be considered by users as some kind of rogue intrusion caused by a virus even.
Other redirects and address mismatches
I have written a whole post on dealing with out-of-stock products for e-commerce sites. There were two major mistakes you could make by redirecting.
- Redirecting to the homepage
- Redirecting to an error page
In both cases, I ended up in somewhere else, not where I originally intended to go so I am put off. It’s the trap door again. Aggravating the case is the lack of what I was looking for initially. In most cases, I hardly find the product without having to click a few times. My expectation was that I would get right where I wanted. That’s what a bookmark is for. So I won’t start from scratch. An error page is even worse. What, a 404 error? Page not found? Oh my! Your site is broken. I better get away from here.
Easy fixes
How to fix such issues? Ask your web developer! S/he can do it within 5 minutes. Ironically you have to redirect dirty URLs polluted by third parties to the original clean ones while redirects have to be limited. And in case there is no other option, there is always a need of a manual link for those who block redirects for security reasons.
(CC BY 2.0) Creative Commons image by cartto
