Recently I cloaked all my hoplinks on my website using HTML redirect. Before I had almost all my reviews indexed in Google. After cloaking the links, I can find only 3-4 reviews of my 30 in Google The reviews were indexed before cloaking the links, so the only thing that comes to my mind that Google didn't like something in cloaking I used Clickbank's suggested HTML redirect to cloak my links: You can find it here - http://www.clickbank.com/affiliate_tools.html#Affiliate_Tools_2 What should I do know?? I can't believe that html redirect is the problem....
I'm sure that clickbanks suggested html has made it's way into googles algorithm. I would use a PHP redirect with a 301 redirect. This tells google that the page has moved and you shouldn't get penalized... I haven't yet. It's not easy to outsmart google as their algorithm is constantly improving. I personally don't use cloaked links as tests that I've conducted show a negligible difference in sales.
why not simply do a mouse overlay? that means when mouse goes over your anchor text, it will shows differently?
andrew1056 So should I try using PHP redirect? Is the one below fine? toby I want to use something simple
Yes, use php redirects. They work great for me, and they also allow you to change the address quickly in case you want to switch a publisher instead of replacing many separate links. nadavs
No. The red code is the stuff thats doing the redirect. Your users will just see a html link and "loading" if you remove that.
How about doing redirects in htaccess? How I redirect through htaccess is make an anchor link with the clickbank publisher id as part of the anchor url: http://www.mywebsite.com/re/water4gas/ The apache address takes the clickbank publisher id and changes it over: http://yourid.?.hop.clickbank.net performs a modRewrite rule to put the publisher id where the ? is and redirects to that site. Tom
Here's what I do. I make a php page which accepts to GET variables pub & tid. Your link looks like this: example.com/page.php?pub=publisher&tid=10 Than I make a php script: $pub = $_GET['pub']; $tid = $_GET['tid']; $url = "http://affiliate." . $pub . ".hop.clickbank.net?tid=" . $tid; Header( "HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently" ); Header( "Location:" $url); It works great for me and is relatively simple to implement.
For my links I just use a simple HTML redirect: <html> <head> <meta name = "robots" content = "noindex,nofollow"> <meta http-equiv='refresh' content='0; url=TARGET URL GOES HERE'> </head> </html> Only requires a single change in code, and google doesn't get pissed off since the page isn't indexed by crawlers.
I made a mistake in my code Header( "Location:" $url); it should be this: Header( "Location:" . $url);
The search engines will see it as a permanent redirect and will not index the page where that code is used.
That'll work just fine. I add the 301 redirect because google won't index that page and you really don't want them to.