seems like there are multiple uses for such a concept, but which ones are truly necessary and work well? and which are just wishful thinking? this issue is getting more popular for warez forums, external linking like on blogs, and affiliate link protection as well. possible benefits of using javascript outlinks and/or php redirect tools: - track clicks on outlinks - ease of change (you can simply update the destination URL without changing the internal redirect code) - protect affiliate codes from being hijacked or hiding destinations - shorter URLs with your domain in them... more attractive, more trustable - prevent google/bots from indexing or seeing your hyperlinks (less PR issues, avoid "closed circle" linking, and/or more privacy i.e. for warez sites) - allow destination page to display within your own "ad packed" frame or toolbar - strip http headers (i'm not sure this is possible with either method?) anyway what do you guys think? why do you use these methods? am i missing any? also, if warez sites decide to simply remove the href code and use plaintext hyperlinks, is this truly safe because google can still index such URLs...? does anyone recommend a slick php redirect script that can accomplish any or all of these goals? thanks!
We use it for 2 purposes: 1) Tracking outbound clicks 2) Prevent the passing of PR For any type of paid ads on our site, the URL associated w/ the ad is http://www.mysite.com/redirector.asp?url="EncodedTargetExternalURLForTheAd". The redirector.asp page is disallowed in the robots.txt which prevents crawlers from following the links. This prevents our site from passing PR to the other sites so that we are not in violation of Google's Webmaster Guidelines regarding paid links. So the main reasons I use a redirector.asp page is to preven passing PR to other sites (to avoid penalty) and the page also logs outbound clicks so that we can track clicks. If someone buys an ad on your site and you pass PR to the target of their ad link, you are selling links... And if one of your competitors or some random visitor reports you, it will NOT withstand a manual review by a Googler and will almost certainly without question result in a penalty. To prevent penalty you had better redirect through a page on your site blocked by robots.txt OR have a rel="nofollow" on the link OR do something to prevent the passing of PR.
cool cool. does your script use mysql or is it self-contained? i've also heard some sites that throw their redirect in a disallowed directory, idk why thats any safer though. your method sounds perfectly simple and safe enough.
Whether you disallow the redirector.asp or the folder it's in... same affect. Since our redirect.asp is in the root of our web, I didn't really want to disallow the root folder. We are an all Microsoft shop so don't use MySQL. But we log the clicks to our web traffic analyze from Omniture by doing an AppendToLog() call.