Affiliate website redirection concern
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First of all i want to say hi to everyone here since im a new guy!
The issue:
My website is a price comparison website. I create products and inside these products i list several shops with their priced offers from the lowest to the highest. When a customer clicks the "shop now" button to go to the desired shop a new window pops up telling the user that he is being redirected to that shop. Check the website here and click "shop now" to understand what i mean: https://www.pccdkeys.com/product/buy-world-of-warcraft-legion-cd-key-for-battlenet/
This pop up page is a custom .php called redirect.php. In order to create a unique url for each shop, we add parameters in every URL like this: /redirect.php?id=5030917189616&merchant=CDKEYS&game=4117.
The redirect.php right now is under this setting:
- custom header 301 without destination URL (which probably is wrong)
- it is noindex, follow in meta robots
- the parameters: **id, merchant, game **are set to NO URL's in URL parameters in webmaster tools.
If i remove the 301 redirect from the header it will lead to 200 OK but then its a soft 404 error because the page is small and for sure i dont want 8000 of soft 404 errors because google phantom will destroy me.
Another setting was:
- No custom header so it was 200 OK
- noindex, nofollow (which was for extra protection from the disallow)
- disallowed in robots.txt
Thi setting kept giving soft 404 errors in audits.
I also had it with this setting:
- custom header 301 without destination URL
- meta robots in index, follow
- without disallow in robots
This setting gave me Not followed errors in google webmaster tools.
The question:
Which is the proper setting for this php page? Maybe a combination of the above?
Thanks in advance and sorry for the long post.
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