Redirects to external sites

[vmotuz]

Hi there,

I have listings that all link to external sites. In order to track how many times each link was clicked I coded a redirect script that simply redirects to the respective url.

www.mysite.com/go/123/ - redirects to another site

www.mysite.com/go/541/ - redirects to a different site

Is there anything I should or should not do from seo stand point such as blocking the /go directory in robots or adding a no-follow tag to links? I'd appreciate your advice. Thanks

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Hi Vitaly,

1. The common way to track clicks is by using Google Analytics and event tracking. It's well documented by Google, and many websites use it:

https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/gajs/eventTrackerGuide

Basically, you add a bit of code to every link you want tracked, like so:

[Play](#)

And these clicks show up as events in your Google Analytics report.

2. Redirects like the type you describe are very often used with affiliate links. By redirecting through an internal url, you can not only track the link, but this gives you an opportunity to obfuscate the nature of the link from Google, something many affiliate marketers like to do.  (Personally, I don't think Google gives a hoot if you link to affiliate sites, but that's a different story.

Typically, the redirect directory, often called "go" as in your example, is blocked by the robots.txt file.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /go/

If the redirect passes through an actual web page, then there are other ways Google might crawl and index these pages, and they certainly don't help your rankings, so you'd want to additionally block them with a robots NOINDEX tag. (most of the time, the "go" directory is not an actual webpage, but a program file that performs the redirect without rendering a page, so this usually isn't necessary.

Personally, in most cases #1 is easier and more direct than #2, but which method you choose will depend on your individual goals.

Hope this helps. Best of luck with your SEO!