A Study of URL Redirection Indicating Spam

The use of URL redirections has been recently studied to filter spam as email and web spammers use redirection to camouflage their web pages. However, many web sites also employ redirection for legitimate reasons such as logging, localization, and load-balancing. While a majority of the studies on URL redirection focused on spam redirection, this paper provide a holistic view of the use of URL redirections in the Internet. A redirection study is performed on various sets of known legitimate URLs and spam URLs.