Why meta refresh followed by 2 redirects?

Posted by twneale on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by twneale
Published on 2011-01-13T23:33:03Z Indexed on 2011/01/14 1:53 UTC
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I have encountered several websites where the initial visit by a user results in a http-equiv refresh to another (usually gibberish) url, which then promptly redirects (302) to another gibberish url, which in turn immediately redirects to yet a fourth url that actually displays the landing page for the site.

My question is: what the heck? Why would a server be set up to behave this way?

Here is list of a few sites that do this:

New York State Library - http://nysl.nysed.gov
New York State Regulations provided by Westlaw - http://government.westlaw.com/linkedslice/default.asp?SP=nycrr-1000

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