[spiralpolitik]

"The downside of the second example URL is that if a book or shelf changes its name, references to it based on hierarchical names like this one in the example URL will break."

The author appears to have forgotten about 3xx redirection codes which were intended to solve that very problem.

[fixermark]

3xx redirection requires the backing-store to maintain some kind of permanent edit history, and is therefore not necessarily something one can assume one will have.

There's also the problem of aliasing; if another book by the same name is later added to the shelf, the hierarchical name now references an entirely different resource.

[sametmax]

But have been abused for black SEO and now are considered suspicious by search engines so we use them sparingly.

This is why we can't have nice things.

[always_good]

I don't buy it.

Redirecting to canonical URLs is canonicalization 101. https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139066?hl=en#4

Also, what would be an example of same-origin redirect abuse?

[sametmax]

Bypassing black lists when posting links while still benefiting from crawlers following the links comes to mind.

During the 2000s, following links for a forum or blog was way too expensive, so they had black lists of dirty words to avoid porn sites spaming and get juice during the page rank golden years where any back reference mattered.

Hence it was just easier, to avoid the filters, to create non blacklisted domain names with redirections.

Then another trick was to write a perfectly legitimate page, get google to index it, then redirect that page to the less legitimate page. Because at the time Google refreshed once a week (or a month...), you'd get plenty of traffic and revenue for long enough to be worth it. If you sold niche porn and viagra, that is.

Another one was just to setup fake sites with different URL schemes with stats on them, and get a regular update on which URL formats were getting the best hits. At the time URLs where very important in getting points. Then you would regularly update your most important sites URL scheme accordingly, several times a year if needed.

[always_good]

I have a hard time believing that modern search engines are so incapable that they have to devalue redirects to the point that honest users have to worry about it.

[sametmax]

Well that's just what I know about the things we did then. I'm not working in porn anymore, so I'm missing the new cool tricks, or abuses, depending of your point of view. But the community is VERY creative.

Now the last time I did change massively URLs for a client website and noticed a significant drop in traffic that took a few months to recover was years ago. So the situation might have changed. But I'm not going to test that assumption with my clients money :)

[toast0]

It's been a long time since I accidentally got to porn on the internet. I think that kind of thing is mostly dead (although some of the 'related articles' sections look pretty iffy), and instead porn monetization has moved towards people intentionally looking for porn.

[CM30]

They also tended to use usergroup permissions to restrict new users from posting URLs before they'd been a member for a certain amount of time (or posted a certain amount of messages) or had early posts subject to moderator approval if a link was included.

Never saw a lot of sites using 'innocent' URLs to sneak porn onto random internet forums in the way you describe, cause said sites would simply treat any spammed link as suspicious regardless of what it claimed to be.

[SquareWheel]

What? 301s are the standard way to create redirects. That has nothing to do with blackhat SEO.

The small dip caused by 301s was even recently removed altogether.