how do i use url redirect?

**kevquinlan** · 02-02-06

google is penalising me for my links being to affiliate window.

my website / database knowledge is poorer than it should be!
how would i / where can i download / buy a script / mySQL database type of thing that will let me hide my links.

i already use a links.php script on a website and it works very well for a handful of links but i want to potentially link to 10000's products and i worry it will slow down - I am looking to ideally dump a feed of URL's to MySQL and be able to convert

http://www.awin.afflink.xxx et. to
http://www.mysite.com/link1 (or jump.php?id=1 etc.)

When i look at hotscripts etc i get bogged down looking at things that dont seem quite what im after!

Dont have any moral objections to paying for a product if it is good - but free is better!

Thanks in advance!!!

**Ste** · 02-02-06

Kev,
I have a AW datafeed script that will suit your needs, send me a PM with your email address and I will send it over in zip.

Steve

**stevebrowne** · 03-02-06

Does Google penalise for this? I'd better sort that out then as well!

**kevquinlan** · 03-02-06

it makes it more obvious you are an affiliate site - also you are sending the spiders off to merchants rather than containing them within your site.
Thereby boosting your merchants PageRank at your expense

apparently!

although i have heard conflicting reports if any of this is true

Apart from anything i wanted an easy way of manipulating my merchant links and in the process make the site look a bit more professional

Ste has very helpfully given me a few pointers that should get me thinking - Thanks!!

Cheers everyone

**stevebrowne** · 03-02-06

Good points. Now fixed my site so all links go via a redirect page. no doubt I've missed something, but the main pages delivered by database are all sorted. Pass it into a Base64 conversion so that the destination stays intact, direct the likns toa local page which un base64 the paremeter and redirect. Sorted!

**Robs** · 06-02-06

Originally Posted by kevquinlan

google is penalising me for my links being to affiliate window.

my website / database knowledge is poorer than it should be!
how would i / where can i download / buy a script / mySQL database type of thing that will let me hide my links.

Dont have any moral objections to paying for a product if it is good - but free is better!

Thanks in advance!!!

I have a load of product links in the database and have been trying out a couple of ways to skin this cat.

I have kept intact the product IDs from each product in the database, have a buy now sort of link which links to a javascript redirect using the product id as a reference tag, it figleaves.php?pid=<?php echo $row_myrecordset['Product id']; ?>

The contents of the figleaves.php page are an sql lookup that selects the record based on the Product ID, and a subsequent javascript redirect to forward the user to the destination page.

<script language="Javascript" type="text/javascript">
document.location.href='<?php echo $row_Recordset1['Product URL']; ?>'
</script>

Sounds complicated, but as I parse everything from the database, and use a horizontal looper, I only need to define the first record and the rest are dragged in.

I use a robots exclusion to stop the spiders from crawling the outgoing directory.

Drop me a pm if you want any more info.

ATB

Rob

**eskimo** · 06-02-06

I have to say that you are making two major assumptions

1) affiliate links hurt your SERPs

2) SEs cannot follow jump scripts

I have developed one site with this issue in mind. I decided to use robs method and locate the jump script in a seperate directory. This has a robots file which stops it being spidered - paranoid or what.

Just out of interest, what makes you say your site is being penalised?

**Donk** · 06-02-06

You could use php "header" called by links.php?link=nnn

<?php
if ($_GET['link'])
{

// Look up $url from $_GET['link'] in your database
header("Location: $url");
exit;
}
else
{
header("Location: $page_not_found");
}

bob

**deadgoodundies** · 06-02-06

Not saying he is being penalised but i've seen a lot of affiliate links to our site being dropped from google over the past couple of weeks

**Sammy aff** · 07-02-06

google dont like redirects any shape or form, but sometimes they allow some 'correct' redirects to stick. One or two merchant sites i know of have been doing it for ages. (watch out for the bmw syndrome now though)

I got shafted by google around september last year, and believe it was entirely because of redirect pages--these pages were not serp redirects, rather a surfer hit my site from the serps and then if clicked thru to a merchant went via a redirect page.

Reasons were obvious extreme tracking blah, anyhow i use a simple js redirect then through a 301 this page will load in blah seconds etc.

MSN / Yahoo love them...maybe google eventually, one or two pages are coming back in google. But not holding my breath with google.

Point is, google did me a huge favour banning, cos I was tearing my hair out what the problem was..what did i do etc? Long story, loads of research trial and error etc. Finally found good serps on yahoo/MSN (by accident)

Conclusion:
Yahoo/MSN traffic converts tons better than google, even with less traffic than previous google serps
Moral:
Google surfers are tyre kickers, at least in the industries i'm involved.
Pay no attention to the google god behind the curtain

**Shane** · 07-02-06

I did a cms which had the facility to add the "no follow" tag to any link, and as a result we have a total of about 5 links that acutally take the google spider off site, and that's to other sites of ours,

all affiliate links are within on-site redirects that have the no follow link attribute, seems to work fine, listing ok on a some half decent terms I didn't expect it to.

**uklejon** · 07-02-06

<quote>I use a robots exclusion to stop the spiders from crawling the outgoing directory.</quote>

Don't count on that. We set up a redirect directory last Dec and excluded it in robots.txt and goggle has indexed it !!

**wibble99** · 07-02-06

I redirect my links as while I don't know if the search engines penalise you for affiliate links they may do in the future. Also, Norton Internet Security is a problem where it tries to remove what it thinks are affiliate links from your page, and lots of new computers come with that ready installed so users don't even know that their web pages are being altered as it's a default setting.

What I do, though, is have my redirect URL in one directory and then in the robots.txt I ban all search engines from accessing that directory. So none of them will follow the links and they'll not know that the links are redirects to affiliate sites.

**Robs** · 07-02-06

Originally Posted by misscarolann

<quote>I use a robots exclusion to stop the spiders from crawling the outgoing directory.</quote>

Don't count on that. We set up a redirect directory last Dec and excluded it in robots.txt and goggle has indexed it !!

If you have a meta tag index follow, this overrides the robots.txt exclusion, so that might have been the problem.

**uklejon** · 07-02-06

Nope....the redirect folder contains 1 page which is just pure asp code to re-direct to the correct URL.

Dissalllowed in the robots.txt and still google shows it. Don;t get any hits from searches as there's nothing there but it shows in a site:mydomain.com