Ok I ll try to explain myself, I need to create 3 back links on my site, this back links will direct customers to the checkout page of the affiliate program I'm working with. I need to find a way to hide this backlinks to the Search engines I do not want crawlers to read their codes or follow them to the checkout page. I could use the <a rel="nofollow,noindex" but is not reliable and I must find a way to get customers to the checkout page hiding links to the Search engines. I also though about sending them to another sites page that contains backlinks to the checkout page but still crawlers will follow both links. I hope some one understands what I'm trying to do and helps me Thanks
Instead of a link why don't you use a javascript onclick event to take them to it. Search engines won't read that.
Ok I forgot to mention that I'm not an experienced programmer and my website is based on a wordpress theme, I could use the javascript onclick event, can you point me to an example on how the code is written or a website using it? Thank you I ll appreciate it
you can use your htaccess file to redirect to the affiliate page when you go to a certain url on your page. Then in your robots.txt file, tell search engines they are not allowed to crawl that page. FYI google can read some onclick javascript links.
This is somewhat true. What you have to do is break up the url into different variables. Here is an example: <head> <SCRIPT language="JavaScript"> function onclickredirect() { var url1 = "http"; var url2 = "example"; var url3 = "com"; window.location = url1+"://"+url2+"."+url3; } </SCRIPT> </head> <body> <span onclick="javascript:onclickredirect()" style="text-decoration:underline; color:#00F; cursor:pointer">Click Here</span> </body> Code (markup):
Thank you Josh Fowler, it looks much simpler with the example you posted, but as I understand still there is the possibility that google can read the onclick event and follow the backlink even if I break up the url into different variables, and that must not happen, no crawler shall read the backlink or my site will get banned from SE. I could use robots.txt but what I want is to make it look to the search engines like the link to the checkout page does not exist in my site. Does google can read the onclick event even if I do as Josh says and break up the URL into variables? Thank you very much for your time....
I think I know what you're doing here =p. You should create a .info domain to do all your affiliate "blasting" to. That way if it gets dinged by search engines...you won't care. OR use PHP redirect in a blocked directory on your domain? I prefer the .info when I do my affiliate blasting. Spiders can crawl through "nofollow, noindex" and Java Script onClick...don't risk it on a valuable domain.
Well, it's not just that it split the url but also it uses a <span> tag instead of an <a> tag too in the code I gave you. I have used this example once or twice and have never had Google follow the onclick as a <span> tag and the url split. Here's what I would do just in case though...you could test it with a couple links on that site or even other sites and see if Google follows it for you. I have never seen it personally but they get smarter and smarter people at Google everyday that try to find ways of extracting links from sites.
if you dont want a certain page crawled by search engine spider i do believe that you need to use the robot.txt so that you can control the search engine robots and not to crawl your page
Thank you all for your ideas, I thing I got it. I'm going to use a combination of robots, onclick events and nofollow noindex attributes to hide them. first I'm going to give it a try with other backlinks and if they don't get crawled means that the combination worked and I can proceed to add the affiliate backlinks