Jump to URL's?!?!

[apg1985]

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I sore on an affiliate website, that the source code showed something like affiliatedomain.co.uk/gifts/jump/somepage.php

but when you click it, it redirects to a merchant website with the affiliate tracking link intact, so a 301 redirect from a htaccess file im guessing.

The only reason why I could imagine anyone would want to do this is to trick Google into thinking this website is not an affiliate website, or doesnt have any outbound links, thus ranking better.

Am I on the right lines here?

[D-Mac]

it can look neater than an affiliate url, plus more importantly you can record the click in your own logs

[Aquanuke]

I do it as a rule. Much easier for own inhouse tracking and managing links. If a merchant goes awol takes one click my end to remove all their links or redirect them elsewhere.

[trevHCS]

In a lot of cases it's not so much about tricking Google as worries that Google and similar might downgrade affiliate sites where they see a lot of outgoing affiliate links. As there's a lot of black magic about the big G algo's and even more about Bing and Yahoo (if they've not merged yet), people don't want to take the risk. You can often spot this by the /jump/ bit of the URL being listed in robots.txt

Another reason can be if you want to display a splash page to say "We're not connecting you with our partner site X" which might help people understand why they've just jumped to an entirely different web site.

Thirdly, external tracking as mentioned however is also a really good reason to do this plus the ability to instantly change URLs as mentioned above.

On the not having any external links idea - in theory that works, but I suspect the bots prefer to see some external links as they allow freeflow of information around the web and that's what a chunk of all the algo's are now based on. Too many dead ends means the bots don't have anywhere else to go.

Trev