Hi all, I have an affiliate site and I am setting up some simple tracking, using PHP. When the user clicks on a merchants product to buy it from the merchant site, I send them to a simple tracking page first. The tracking page inserts the keyword that the user used to find my site, the product they have selected, and a few other bits and pieces and then sends them to the merchants site. The question is, what is a google friendly way to redirect a customer in cases like this? I have heard that using a meta refresh is a big no no. So I am planning on using php's header() function in the tracking page. ie header ("Location: merchant url"). Does anyone know if google has a problem with this method?
This should work for you: header("HTTP/1.0 301 Moved Permanently"); header("Location: http://www.example.com/filename"); Code (markup): Sending the location alone will send a '302 Found' status code, which does not seem to be a problem with Google anymore (they are getting crawled, but not indexed as they have in the past). It is a best practice to use a 301 status code. Check your staus codes here.
But a 301 re-direct is for a permanent redirect. This is not permanent! All the links to the merchant sites will be passed through the tracking page, so the destination url will be constantly changing. Therefore, surely 301 re-direct is not an option here?!?