PHP Redirection better than Nofollow?
-
Hello, if I have affiliate outbound links in my blogs, what's better in terms of SEO, to use PHP Redirection or Nofollow for those links?
For example, instead of using nofollow for the outbound affiliate links, I can use some plugin for WordPress that does this:
mydomain.com/affiliatesitename1 -> redirects to the affiliate link1.
mydomain.com/affiliatesitename2 -> redirects to the affiliate link2.
mydomain.com/affiliatesitename3 -> redirects to the affiliate link3.
Is this better?
Thanks.
-
Excellent points and advice, thanks everyone for answering.
-
Federico - Sure... if it does that as part of the plugin, then it should be good to go...
-
Hey Jeff, probably if there's a plugin designed to specifically redirect affiliate links I bet it already does a 302 redirect while suggesting to add the disallow in the robots.txt (or even adding itself).
-
My hunch is that if you use the method you just outlined, where:
mydomain.com/affiliatesitename1 -> redirects to the affiliate link1... you are essentially creating the equivalent of a followed, 301 redirect from your site to their site, and passing along link value as a result. It would appear to me that this would be a followed link. Depending on the number of redirects, a percentage of the link value may be lost as a result. But if that is what you would like to do, then go ahead and do so.
But a better practice would be to no-follow those links, as they are outbound affiliate links.
Hope this makes sense?
Thanks,
Jeff -
Both will actually have the same effect as long as you nofollow your affiliate links directly or the PHP script that does the redirection is disallowed via the robots.txt + makes a 302 redirect.
The downside of using nofollow is that you can't track the hits on those links from your end, but with PHP you can save that into a DB or any file.
Hope that helps!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Fitness- china.com 301 Redirects
After I switched to 301, will the backlinks obtained by the previous domain name be transferred to the new URL? our Weight Machine new URL https://www.fitness-china.com/weight-machine
Link Building | | ahislop5740 -
Buy domain, redirect, get all the good links (+link juice) and disavow the spammy ones?
There is a domain for sale that has a quite nice profile and a lot of good backlinks, but also quite a few spammy ones. This domain has a Spam Score of 14% acc. to Moz Link explorer, ours has only 2%. My questions: 1. The domain and the good backlinks are related to or close to our content/keywords. But we are worried whether the "spammy" ones will hurt us. Does anyone has experience with this? 2. Would it help if we disavow the spammy backlinks afterwards? And if so, how do we do that? Add new domain to search console, disavow the bad links and then redirect the entire domain to our domain or redirect the domain first and then disavow from our property? Many thanks for your help!
Link Building | | pissuptours0 -
Very old site wanting a revamp - how to handle all the redirects/URL changes
Hi all, I have a very very old site, that requires a facelift (going from an old clunky CMS to wordpress). A problem I know I am going to face is that this site has a very poor URL structure (www.site.com/section/1/section/ etc) which I plan on cleaning up. but how do I handle the 100+ backlinks this website has point to such links? If someone could point me in the direction of an article or such that would be great. Thanks,
Link Building | | Greenroads0 -
Instructables site - follow and nofollow
Hi, I haven't been able to find a clear answer to this issue yet, so I'm posting here for help. I have just created a profile on the site Instructables - http://www.instructables.com/ as well as an article. The issue is that I could find most of the published articles there have follow links in them - e.g links under materials: http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-Make-a-Reclaimed-Industrial-Coffee-Table/ - however mine is attributed nofollow links. I simply don't know why this is or if there is a way around it to get the links followed. This question only relates to the links in the articles, not the profile links - which are followed. Anybody knows? Thanks, Alex
Link Building | | alexddseo0 -
Penalty? NoFollowed Link Profile
Could an abnormal ratio of nofollow links cause a drop in rankings? Our "Followed Linking Root Domains vs. NoFollowed Linking Root Domains" is 50/50... while our competitors have an average ratio of 90/10. The reason for our abnormal ratio is that: A) We're a relatively new site, with a small link profile so far. B) We have a WordPress plugin that allows other publishers to add our content to their site (which has a nofollow backlink included). And, as a followup question... if we removed the nofollow backlink completely, but still left the branded text there... could we potentially still benefit from it (our brand name being near targeted keywords that appear in the plugin content)?
Link Building | | JABacchetta0 -
Redirect a 404 page
Hi We encountered a problem with our site during a migration to a new platform and we lost much of link juice. I have noticed on SEOmoz Open Site explorer that our old urls from the old site still exists and many have high page authority. The urls all redirected currently to a 404 page and it is not possible to retrieve the old information For example this page http://www.featuredeco.co.uk/mall/departmentpage.cfm/FeatureDeco/_71989/1 This has a page authority of 32. Is it possible to retrieve the link juice from these pages and channel it on the Kind regards Paul
Link Building | | prano0 -
Do NOFOLLOW backlinks have ANY value? or did I waste money?
So, I hired a helping hand to create some back-links for me (in form of comments on some blogs and forums etc) About 60% of those links created are using "nofollow" attribute in the link. Is there ANY - ANY! value in creating such links? or is just wasted time and money and Google will absolutely not give any love for NOFOLLOW links? please share you insight. thnak you.
Link Building | | limens0 -
Nofollow links & content syndication
When syndicating content, I have heard/read that even if the piece you syndicate has a link back to your site (original post), the engines should be able to tell your post is the original because of the link that is pointing back. Is this the case when the links are "nofollow"? I think not, but I just would like to get someone else point of view. I think that if they don't want to follow the links, they should at least add noindex meta robots tags to the post so it doesn't create duplicate content... Any thoughts? Thanks!
Link Building | | bonnierSEO0