redirecting off dead craigslist pages

Hmmm.. once again this might be something everyone knew but me. Then again maybe not.

I posted a bunch of ads on craigslist today, of course the douches flagged them within minutes.. Anyway, I was checking my stats and looking at the referring URLs and I clicked on the craigslist URL's.. and to my surprise, my ads were there. I checked the other ones, sure enough, the pages work with links intact.

I wish I knew about this when I was into bulk email. Talk about a bulletproof host.

EDIT: Sorry to be misleading.. Re-directing is not the proper term.. but you get my meaning...

The more I think about this the more I think this is something everyone knew but me. Seems a little too obvious.

I didn't explain this well, and I have gotten a few people asking me what the hell I was talking about. So here:

What I meant was if you make a post and it is flagged, the URL appears to be good even though the post isn't listed in the index anymore. So for example, a post in the stats will appear like this:

(edited) hxxp://*****.craigslist.org/ele/55443***.html

if you pop that URL into a browser, the page is still good, and the links work. I don't know how long these pages last, I would assume they are purged at some point but this would be a good way to host a link and throw all kinds of dubious traffic at it without worrying about the host removing the page, which was always a concern when emailing.

would be good for inbound links then. im not sure if CL uses nofollow or not, but if no, then you could post all kinds of garbage with your links and even if they get flagged, as long as the search engines still spider those pages, i guess the inbound links should count

gts6,
I don't think SEs will be spider those pages. How will they know the existence of the pages when they do not exist in the sitemap/index? I mean only the poster knows the exact location of the page.

What buzzkill is trying to say is that these ads can be used as a temp. host for pages used for bulk mailing.

true.. but maybe they are linked to somewhere else that is just not apparent at first glance. you are probably right, but it sure is worth a test just to make sure.

What I think is interesting is if the link is there, why not post that in an RSS feed that goes to a number of other Web 2.0 sites that you have set up and the SE will crawl the page within hours.

FWIW, I don't think those pages are indexed. Craigslist has an agreement with Google. An easy way to tell this is to notice that Goog doesn't cache their pages.

I was working with a certain magazine client last month when I noticed that some of their iframe content -- hosted by a third party vendor -- was indexed ... instead of the page that contained the iframe. They asked me if they should call Google and ask them to direct those SER's to the page containing the iframe, since they already had a relationship.

Plus, if you include a backlink to your site on your post to CL, a "nofollow" tag is included by the time your post is made public.

Best,
Sine

P.S. If CL flags or deletes your post, it usually shows up as "active" in your account in any case. I presume this is to keep you thinking that all is well with your post so you'll not attempt further breaking of TOS.

that is another interesting idea. only thing is i am not sure if the linkto it will pull the same weight as a page that is directly linked to from CL somewhere.

I don't think but am not sure that craigslist ever removes an ad page
from their site. It is just no longer available from the headline page
after a certain amount of time because maybe they just disconnect
the link from the headline to the ad page.

The only way to really find out is to post some ads and keep the url
from the ad page (not the headline page) and go back maybe two or
three months later to see if the ad page is still there.

This is very interesting... lots of blackhat ways to use this. Wonder
what craigslist respsonse to this is going to be, because this is going
to be abused big time...

tomren

No they are not indexed and especially if they are flagged and removed. But yes my point was that when a post if flagged it is not actually taken down, its just delisted, the page actually does still exist, so yes, it is good for mailing and not losing the page, we used to call them jump pages I dont know if that term is accurate anymore or if it now means something else.

Interesting idea. Not sure how long they stay up but it's not long.