PHP Redirection better than Nofollow?
-
Hello, if I have affiliate outbound links in my blogs, what's better in terms of SEO, to use PHP Redirection or Nofollow for those links?
For example, instead of using nofollow for the outbound affiliate links, I can use some plugin for WordPress that does this:
mydomain.com/affiliatesitename1 -> redirects to the affiliate link1.
mydomain.com/affiliatesitename2 -> redirects to the affiliate link2.
mydomain.com/affiliatesitename3 -> redirects to the affiliate link3.
Is this better?
Thanks.
-
Excellent points and advice, thanks everyone for answering.
-
Federico - Sure... if it does that as part of the plugin, then it should be good to go...
-
Hey Jeff, probably if there's a plugin designed to specifically redirect affiliate links I bet it already does a 302 redirect while suggesting to add the disallow in the robots.txt (or even adding itself).
-
My hunch is that if you use the method you just outlined, where:
mydomain.com/affiliatesitename1 -> redirects to the affiliate link1... you are essentially creating the equivalent of a followed, 301 redirect from your site to their site, and passing along link value as a result. It would appear to me that this would be a followed link. Depending on the number of redirects, a percentage of the link value may be lost as a result. But if that is what you would like to do, then go ahead and do so.
But a better practice would be to no-follow those links, as they are outbound affiliate links.
Hope this makes sense?
Thanks,
Jeff -
Both will actually have the same effect as long as you nofollow your affiliate links directly or the PHP script that does the redirection is disallowed via the robots.txt + makes a 302 redirect.
The downside of using nofollow is that you can't track the hits on those links from your end, but with PHP you can save that into a DB or any file.
Hope that helps!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
How to make Form Type Links have "Nofollow" attributes
Hello guys, in doing an analysis of our website using SEMRush, we discovered that there are Form Type links from some of the business websites connected to our website with follow attributes. SEMRush has identified them as toxic backlinks. What is the proper HTML code structure for setting Form Type links with nofollow attributes?
Link Building | | Lovingly0 -
301 redirect lost page authority & total links how ensure it passes on.
hello, I recently changed from www to non www. I have redirected my whole website so if I type www. it goes to the non-www page. doing a open site explorer I noticed my www. still has the page authority 14/100 with 6 links. where as the non-www page has 1/100 page authority and no links. how do I get the www. to mirror the non-www links?
Link Building | | finnmoto
eg if you goto http://www.finnmoto.com.au/mens-motorcycle-kevlar-hoodie/ it will goto the non-www version automatically, so why does the non-www replicate the page authority / total links attached picture for reference.
Google webmaster has been selected for non-www, its been about 2 weeks.
my domain authority i think about about 21 or more now its 19 aswell. I have a feeling:
nofollow or rel=canonical has something to do with it but Ill need read into what that does and how to apply. any ideas? uRiJ2Ul.png?10 -
Google indexing nofollow links
Hi Guys I have yellowpages.com.au appearing in the link profiles for some of my clients, but not in others (even if clients without the link in their profile have had an actual link on yellowpages.com.au longer than some who do have it in their profile). My understanding is that Google MAY eventually index a nofollow link... My question is what would cause Google to actually index it?
Link Building | | JuiceBoxOM0 -
301 Redirect and Google...
Hi all Recently, Google has indexed the landing page url for our product differently. This has just happened. So now, when you used search for "DocRead" you would find the top result being : "http://www.collaboris.com/products/policy-and-procedure-management-software" which is what i want. However, now it's indexing it as "http://www.collaboris.com/products" this page is simply a redirect to our product page as it's part of the menu. If I look in fiddler when requesting http://www.collaboris.com/products I can see its doing a 301 redirect, which is fine. Why is Google storing the wrong url ? I also noticed we dropped in our rankings quite significantly last week.
Link Building | | MarkQJones0 -
Best way to filter out the nofollowed links from WMT?
When I'm downloading links from WMT to audit them for my unnatural links clients I generally check each individual link. If it is a nofollowed link I make a note that it is nofollowed and move on. I'm thinking that there has to be a quicker way to find all of the nofollowed links so that I can filter them out from the beginning. How would I do that?
Link Building | | MarieHaynes1 -
Do NoFollow links count at all?
Does anyone really know whether or not links with rel=nofollow provide any value for link building at all? Thanks in advance!
Link Building | | dan.backowski1 -
How does this site rank higher than a seemingly better one??
Ok, I'm really trying to wrap my self around all this SEO stuff. Right when I think I'm grasping it, I come across something like this. When running a keyword difficulty report for the term "essay editing", the top two results are: www.papercheck.com/essay-editing.html www.gradesaver.com/essay-editing/ The first result has a PA of 37, 2 linking page domains, DA of 48, and 197 root linking domains. The second has a PA of 65, 32 linking page domains, DA of 68, and 2,572 root linking domains. What the heck is going on here!?!? I can't understand it. I checked anchor text and that doesn't appear to be it. The only thing I can find is that the papercheck has a link from a site (marketwire) with a DA of 90 while the #2 guy's highest linking domain has a DA of 60. However, I have a really hard time wrapping my head around this considering the total linking domain stats compared to one another. Any insight is much appreciate... this is frustrating trying to grasp these situations! Thanks!
Link Building | | Kibin0 -
Brand new website, should I nofollow almost all internal links?
Hi, As I am creating a completely new website for my employer (she will have zero incoming links, even the URL will be different), would it be advantageous to allow follows to the other internal pages from the home page, but disallow follows on all other internal links on each subsequent page? So, for example each page will have this many internal links: Home page: 5 (all 5 service pages) Recruiting: 1 (home link) Services: 1 (home link) Talent Assessment: 1 (home link) etc. Does this make sense to bolster the home page until we can get some links coming in?
Link Building | | wlw20090