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Redirect hijack prevention

Purpose: Practical steps to keep older domains predictable and safe by preventing unexpected redirects, parking pages, and injected outbound links.

Why this matters

Unexpected redirects are a common failure mode for older domains: a single catch-all 301 to an unrelated site is enough to mislead users, trip security scanners, and damage trust. Static HTML reduces moving parts, but the most important controls are operational: who can change DNS, who can change server config, and how quickly drift is detected.

Common hijack patterns

The most frequent pattern is a catch-all redirect on a legacy host. Sometimes it is configured intentionally during a migration (“send everything to the homepage”), and then forgotten. Sometimes it is introduced by a compromised control panel, a stale DNS record that points to a parking provider, or a misconfigured CDN rule. From the outside, these cases look similar: previously distinct URLs collapse into one destination, and the link graph becomes noisy.

Another pattern is silent outbound linking injected into templates or footers. That is one reason WPlus avoids sitewide outbound links entirely and confines the small number of external references to specific hub pages that are easy to review.

Designing for stability: explicit routing, real pages

Redirects are useful when you have a precise migration map. They are risky when used as a blanket behavior (“everything goes to the homepage”). A safer default for legacy sites is explicit routing that serves a real page when it exists and returns a clear 404/410 when it does not.

Some older sites also have heavily referenced error-document URLs (custom 403/404 pages). Those paths should behave like normal documents: they should return a stable response that explains what a user is seeing, without pretending to be the original application.

Examples of legacy-style error-document paths include:

phantom.wplus.net/err/403.html
vh2.wplus.net/403.html

If an error-document URL suddenly redirects elsewhere, many users interpret it as a compromise. Keeping these paths stable is a simple way to improve safety and reduce confusion.

Operational controls that prevent “drift”

Preventing redirect hijacks is mostly about reducing the number of places redirects can be introduced. Keep DNS ownership locked down, use registrar security features, and document which hosts are expected to exist. On the server, keep your Nginx configuration explicit: avoid broad rewrite rules that turn unknown paths into redirects, and prefer returning 410 for suspicious legacy patterns rather than redirecting them elsewhere.

Combine this with monitoring that alerts on new or changed 3xx responses for the set of important legacy URLs. If a redirect changes, treat it as an event worth investigating immediately. The earlier you catch it, the less time search engines spend learning the wrong behaviour.

Prevention checklist

The goal is to make redirect changes both hard to introduce and easy to detect.

Registrar and DNS hardening: enable registry lock where available, use MFA, and keep DNS records minimal and documented.
No catch-all host redirects: avoid rules like “everything redirects to the homepage.” Serve real pages and return clear 404/410 for unknown paths.
Keep linked hosts alive: if www.wplus.net has meaningful deep links, don’t redirect it to wplus.net; serve it as its own static site root.
Prefer 410 for clearly unsafe paths: for off-scope routes, return 410 at the exact path instead of redirecting somewhere else.
Constrain outbound links: keep off-site links rare and auditable to reduce the blast radius of template injection.
Monitor 3xx drift: alert on any new or changed redirect for your curated set of important URLs.

Example NGINX controls

Use explicit routing and blocklists for known-bad legacy patterns. Keep the rules narrow and readable.

location / {
  try_files $uri $uri/ =404;
}

# Example: return 410 for a known-toxic legacy path
location = /pp/fsc/killad.zip {
  return 410;
}

# Avoid catch-all redirects like: return 301 https://example.com/;

Common mistakes

“Temporary” catch-alls: a quick redirect added during a change window becomes permanent.
Unowned DNS drift: old hostnames pointing at parking/CDN defaults without anyone noticing.
Over-broad rewrites: rewriting unknown paths into redirects instead of returning clear 404/410.
Editing live config without review: small changes can affect an entire host.

Detection signals that matter

Unexpected redirects often start small: one hostname or one shared rule changes. The most reliable signal is “a URL that used to be 200 is now 301/302.” Treat that as a priority alert and investigate the layer (DNS/CDN vs server config) before it spreads.

Another practical signal is host consolidation: when an entire host suddenly redirects to one destination, many deep links stop behaving like distinct resources. Keeping legacy hosts separate and explicit is often safer than trying to simplify with a blanket redirect.

Operational note

WPlus keeps hosts separate and config explicit. That makes it harder for a mistake in one place to change behavior everywhere. Outbound links are intentionally rare so they are easier to audit.