Hiding outgoing links on a website

There is a link directory site in a niche that I work in, and it has outgoing links set to something like this:

domain.com/go/target-domain.com

robots.txt looks like this:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /go/
Disallow: /go/*

And when I go to domain.com/go I get a 500 error, and some kind of message get displayed, it looks like it was made by the owner of the site.

So this is hiding the outgoing links in a way, I am not sure what is the purpose of this. Does anybody have an idea what something like this is for. The website (one page) has a lot of links, like 1,000 / 1,500 or more. There is internal pages too, but this is not of interest here.

Thanks.

 

It is usually done to cloak affiliate links. For something like that, the visitor clicks on the link to yoursite.com/go/anothersite.com and often a mod_rewrite statement is used to direct the request to the /go/ folder (which may not exist) to another file where a either a look-up or database query is performed to get the link to refer the visitor to. Then a HTTP header is sent as a response redirecting the visitor to the real link.

The robots.txt file has nothing to do with the link redirect. The robots.txt is there to discourage search engine bots from crawling any links in the /go/ folder.

I am not sure what the 500 error is about. But is there actually a /go/ folder and if so, is there an .htaccess or anything else in it? 500 errors are usually an htaccess misconfiguration or file permissions issue.

 

Ok. So I add a url like "http[:]//domain.com/go/target-domain[.]com" to a website code, and then I set up a .htaccess redirection for the /go folder, which probably does not exist, and the traget location can be read from a text file or a database? 500 error I dont think it is a mistake, I think it was set up this way for a reason, so this would be a way of getting this to work, lets say, I am not sure (I am not new to this, I am familiar with websites, Linux and all this, I've been working on this for quite some time).

I escaped some signs in the domain name, as I was not able to publish the post.

 

You have the general idea about link cloaking. I don't think the 500 Internal Server Error is intentional.

I can't say how you would get what already exists to work. If you are using PHP, there are lots of tutorials on link cloaking you can use to get up and running. You may even find some free scripts you can use.

 

disallow:go/

 

Go for dofollow.