Hey, I'm pretty new over here and have a question that might have been answered before but i can't find it with the search function. On my site I used to have some outgoing links containing my aff id. Now I would like to know if it's better to send them to a certain dir at my server and redirect them with a script like this: <a href="/go/trigger-link-goes-here.asp"> Code (markup): the trigger part refers to a file in /go/ and send them where i want them. I would like to hear your thoughts about this Tia
It depends on what the affiliate companies allow. I prefer to use a self written script to keep track of affiliate links. That way when they are updated/changed, you can edit the link in one file and it will update across your whole site.
yeah, thats one reason.. control the links. But I want to know if its better for seo purposes to have less outgoing links this way.
Google supports redirects and counts them as outgoing links, unless you disallow /go/trigger-link-goes-here.asp in robots.txt.
That would be good in the sense of not passing along any juice, as the spider would not follow the link. I think the best thing you could do would be to only allow outgoing links to related content. Google should see that as a good thing. The affiliate links may not be seen as good or bad, but why send them juice?