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Avoid redirecting file downloads to Item landing pages

Some DSpace sites make the mistake of redirecting Make sure that you never redirect some or all "direct file downloads" (i.e. users who directly jump to downloading a file, often from a search engine results page) to the associated Item's splash/landing page.  This may be done  In the past, some DSpace sites have added these custom URL redirects in order to facilitate capturing analytics/ statistics via Google Analytics or similar Javascript based analytics.

While these URL redirects may seem harmless, such URLs they may be flagged as cloaking or spam by Google, Google Scholar and other major search engines. This , in turn, may hurt your site's search engine ranking or even cause your entire site to be flagged for removal from the search engine.

If you have these URL redirects in place, it is highly recommended to remove them immediately. If you created these redirects to facilitate capturing download statistics in Google Analytics, you should instead consider upgrading to DSpace 5.0 or above, which is able to automatically record bitstream downloads in Google Analytics (see DS-2088) without the need for any URL redirects.

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