What's the Best Way to Hide Redirects from Search Engines?

[JaredB]

Hey everybody,

I like to use php redirects for affiliate links so they look better.  I keep them all in the same directory.  I read recently that these may hurt SEO.

A couple quick questions:

Is this the best way to redirect affiliate links?

Should I simply block the directory in robots.txt?

Any other suggestions from you SEO guyses and galz?

Thanks!

Jared

[JaredB]

Hey William,

By "looks better", I have been taught that when people (especially marketers) hover over a link, they check out where it takes them by looking at the bottom left of the browser before clicking it.

The redirect makes the URL more friendly to click.

[Marcus_Miller]

Hey Jared

I am guessing you are using

header('Location: http://www.example.com/');

Which triggers a 302 temporary redirection which as we know passes nothing.

I have seen this on other bespoke sites and even on some older shopping cart scripts etc and never seen it hurt anything from an SEO perspective. That's not to say it doesn't, but I have never seen it when it is used in this way. It's for an external link as well so I would not worry about it too much.

This is one of those things, you want to preserve these links, I am guessing you want to hide them and this solution kind of meets your goals.

Really, if you had lots of links to pages you want  to pass page rank or anchors into, or you were being linked to in this way, then the 302 would be  a negative thing as no anchor or link juice is passed down the link. But, in this instance, I really can't see it doing any harm.

Happy to take a look at the page and provide some more targeted feedback if it helps.

Marcus

[SteveOllington]

Yeah isn't there tools to put the link through for that?

[stevenheron]

I think he means that by masking the link it makes hoplink theft more difficult, and also savy users would be less aware that the links are in fact affiliate links.

[WilliamBay]

Well, if you don't want Google to see the list, then blocking the page with robots.txt is your solution.

But if it is a valuable list of resources it may be worth showing off that people use it.

In either case I'm not sure you want to use a php redirect. You could use No-Follow if you actually don't want to vouch for that site. But, I guess that all depends on what the site is.

I am a little confused by what you mean when you say "they looks better."

[stevenheron]

You should be using redirects as a means of masking your affiliation from the site visitor, not from search engines. I can't see anything wrong with using PHP redirects, but do them to prevent hoplink theft, as there's no actual SEO advantage since Google can see through redirects.

[SteveOllington]

Just a guess from me here, but I don't think hiding redirects from a search engine would be a good idea at all. I mean, we know they really don't like us trying to hide stuff from them whether it's keywords or anything else. Not sure how that would work out, or what the chances of anything bad happening from it would be, but I would assume that if Google thought people were doing it, it would soon be in their webmaster guidelines as "Don't". But again, complete guess, I don't know enough about it to say anything for sure.