Sneaky Redirects
Sending visitors or crawlers to a page different from the one they asked for, typically by behaving normally on desktop while redirecting mobile visitors from search to gambling or scam destinations.
Analogy Mental model
A shop sign that says bookshop, and it is one, unless the person walking in is a child alone, at which point the floor opens and drops them somewhere else.
In practice What you actually do
On legitimate sites this is usually not an SEO decision at all but an injected script from a compromised plugin, triggered only for mobile visitors arriving from search. Check by loading your own result from a search on a phone in a private window, logged out.
Where people get burned Pitfalls
The site owner testing on a desktop browser sees nothing wrong, which is exactly why these infections persist for months. Enable the security alerts in Search Console so the compromise is reported rather than discovered by a customer.
This entry was written in English from the Chinese original, not machine-translated. Read the Chinese version →