Hi there! I need to know the right term/word for linking to other url's like: http://www.company.com/goto/2222/32082233387/http://www.otherdomain.com The company using this linking "structure" is a "yellow pages directory". What is the positive/negative effects with this when working with SEO?
I am guessing you're talking about using redirector pages. Sites like "yellow pages directory" don't want to get accused by Google of selling links for the purpose of manipulating the SERPs. Allowing sites to by and ad and then linking to them without a rel="nofollow" attribute or some method to prevent the passing of PR could lead to a penalty if they were discovered. They also don't necessarily want to vouch for each and every site that has a listing in their directory. Linking to a "bad neighborhood" site with a followed link could result in yellow pages being penalized as well since they could be viewed as promoting a bad site by passing it PR and giving them credit for the link text. Sometimes these types of sites also want to track how many times someone clicked a link on a page in their directory. Since the user just kind of disappears into thin air when they click on a directory link, yellow pages can't really track the click with a web analyzer because the next request will be to the other web site's server, not the yellow pages server. To avoid the first two situations above and/or to track clicks, sites like these will frequently use what is called a redirector page. So if a yellow pages directory page has links to 3 sites on it, rather than the links appearing as: they will render the links on their pages similar to: So when a visitor clicks on a link on their directory page, it causes the user's browser to first request the local redirector page which takes a query string parameter for the final destination URL (the site that bought the listing). The final destination URL is URL encoded in the link so that it can be passed to the redirector page as a query string parameter. The local redirector.php page is typicaly blocked in the robots.txt file with something like: so that it does NOT eventually pass any PR to the destination URLs being passed in on the query string. This keeps the yellow page directory from violating Google's Webmaster Guidelines because they cannot be accused now of selling links for manipuating search engine rankings or promoting a bad neighborhood site by passing it PR. The robots.txt disallow blocks the flow of PR from the redirector page to the destination URL. The code in the redirector page will typically first retrieve the URL encoded destination URL from the query string parameter and decode it. If they want to track clicks the redirector.php page will then execute a few lines of code to log somewhere (in a flat file or database) that someone clicked on a link for that particular decoded destination URL, and then 302 redirect the user's browser to the decoded destination URL.