Question about Passing Link Juice via Redirect

[CashCowAdv]

Hey!

I'm looking at a competitor's backlink profile via SEMRush and see that there's a domain that redirects to his webpage like this:
domainEx.com/?URL=competitorsDomain%2F.

domainEx.com does not redirect and is a different site than competitorsDomain.

Questions:
- Can someone clarify if this passes link juice and the cause?
- If it does pass link juice, any insight on leveraging this tactic?

Thanks!

 

[Ryuzaki]

You'll find endless amounts of that crap. I call them "Exit Intent" redirects. You can get one from every existing Google domain. There's some self-hosted display ad platform that uses 301 redirects too, where you can just manually create non-existent URLs like you shared, and then get them crawled.

Why people do this is to trick sites like Ahrefs to give them a super high DR score (and why Ahrefs hasn't ignored these is beyond me). It's how most of those Fiverr "increase your DR" packages work. They're used to scam link buyers, basically.

Do they pass juice? No, I don't think they do, because the links don't exist on pages that exist, so there's no page rank flowing. Could there be some non-page-rank metrics flowing? Maybe. I'm assuming Google has this sorted out, even if Ahrefs and the like don't.