redirects from link directories - common practice?

[northpointaiki]

Is it common practice for link directories to change the url of my link such that it must first pass through their own url? Why do they do this? Does it hurt one's own site?

E.g., I submitted http://www.a1-outdoors.com to www.outdoormaniacs.com, a directory. They altered the url to a dynamic links page - www.outdoorsmaniac.com?*...which goes through a redirect first.

Is this a problem?

[northpointaiki]

just saw on my weblogs that there were dozens of 404's from this site, for some reason. Someone looked up my outdoormaniacs link, then my site, then there were all kinds of weird searches for url's...http://www.a1-outdoors.com/outblog/until, http://www.a1-outdoors.com/outblog/name*.generator*, http://www.a1-outdoors.com/outblog/MN

etc.

Any guesses what this is all about?

[Tuning]

Thats what we call Non-SEF ( Search Engine Friendliness ). Submit to similar directories only if you expecting traffic and not a backlink. ;)

[northpointaiki]

Tuning - can you tell me, will this actually cause problems with GG, etc.?

[Tuning]

Since it won't count as a backlink, there is no problem. ( AFAIK )

[sufyaaan]

Such redirection links are good only for getting traffic from those directories. They won't be treated as backlinks to your site by SEs. Hence, if you think they will give you some traffic then they are worth trying for.

[mdvaldosta]

I don't touch redirects with a 10 foot pole, since who would submit to a directory for traffic anyways? The only directories sending traffic IMO are directories of directories.

[northpointaiki]

I only discovered outdoormaniacs did this after the fact. It occurs to me now, before submitting to a directory, to check a sample of links on the site to ensure they don't do redirects.

[northpointaiki]

Now, I am getting googlebot 404's on urls which never existed - all nonsense URL's seeminkgly emanating from this site. Anyone have this experience, and can anyone make a suggestion?

[cagintranet]

I don't touch redirects with a 10 foot pole, since who would submit to a directory for traffic anyways? The only directories sending traffic IMO are directories of directories.


Regular Directories that use these redirects are just plain wrong. Now i say this even though my Pittsburgh Directory uses them. The reason i did this is so i can keep track of which links are popular so that i can shift my site around and optimize those pages for adsense.

Anyway, the point is that my site has redirects and i give my links a lot of traffic. But i am sure that is only because of my niche market and original content.

[northpointaiki]

Hi all - just did a back link search on MSN, and the last link is the link of this website of this discussion. I removed my link from this directory. Now, when you click on the redirect link, it does not go to a 404 page, but rather goes to the home page of this links directory. Any thoughts as to whether this is a problem, and if so, how best to rectify it?

Many thanks.

Paul