Business.com Links Redirected?

They look like direct links but are actually redirects

[ichthyous]

Hello there, I purchased a business.com listing this weekend after checking out their site. I only paid their exhorbitant fee after checking the links and seeing that they directly linked to the websites. When I ran a link report using Firefox webmaster tools it showed all the directory links as the actual site urls. However, now that the link is live is see that when you click on it the user is first redirected for a split second to http://rd.business.com/index.asp?bdcz=il.l.ml.e&bdcr=1&bdcu=http%3A//example.com/&bdcs=CFE, then is sent to the actual site.

My question is two parts...
1) what kind of link is this exactly that looks direct when you roll over it but is actually a redirect?
2) will this type of link transfer any PR or be counted in my backlinks profile with the search engines?

[edited by: tedster at 11:53 pm (utc) on April 21, 2009]
[edit reason] delink the example url [/edit]

[anallawalla]

The source looks like this:

<a href="http*//www.example.com/arkansas/" onclick="return gt(this.href,'il.l.ml.e','6','','')" target="_blank" class="titleli">Arkansas widgets &amp; midgets</a>

Also this variation:

<a href="http*//www.example.com" onclick="return gt(this.href,'c.nav.10','0','','')" target=_blank>Home</a>

I hope a JavaScript user comes by to explain it, but I think it is a clean link.

[whoisgregg]

I can weigh in on the javascript question. :)

If the

href

is the actual website URL, then it's clean. For now at least, the spiders only care about the actual

href

value in the source code of the page.

The onclick event that is triggered there only occurs for users with javascript enabled (so no spiders) and what it does is it says "before you go to this

href

, run this javascript function." And that javascript function says "go to this redirect script instead and ignore the hard-coded

href

."

It's a pretty standard approach precisely because it only affects the "real" visitors.

[tedster]

The source analawalla posted is a clean link - even with javascript turned off, the link works because there is a straight html component for the href attriubte. So the question becomes how does Google treat such a link. Is it a "paid link" or is it an "approved editorial directory." Only Google knows for sure.

I have a client whose site is on business.com and their links are not so clean. Instead we see:

http://rd.business.com/index.asp?bdcu=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.example.com%2F&bdcf=[long string]&bdcr=3&partner=[another long string]

[anallawalla]

I just realised that business.com must be using the JavaScript part of that link for tracking purposes, while giving the customer a clean link.

I used to manage such ads for a client five years ago and back then you paid different amounts for different positions - each listing has an incremental number in that code. If you paid for the 10th position and there were three advertisers, you got the third spot if the other two had paid for a higher position. Business.com has directory "featured" listings as well as "Sponsored Links" (their own PPC ads) - the latter are nofollowed and come from the rd subdomain. The "Breaking News" links are also nofollowed.

[ichthyous]

Yes that was the original point of the post Tedster...are the directory links that start with "rd.business.com" and have the url embedded in them indexed by google? The link is being reported back in Google WMT as coming from the directory category. I do think it's rather sneaky of them to show the url when you roll over but the other url when you click on the link

[whoisgregg]

You have to look at the source code, not what happens while browsing.

The "sponsored links" and such at the top and bottom of the page are going through the rd.business.com links which are a 302 redirect, plus most of them are also nofollowed. (The exception seems to be "featured links" which are still redirects, but are not nofollowed.)

The actual directory listings farther down on the page (under the letter headings like A, B, C, etc.) tend to be direct links in the source code. So, even though the user still gets the redirect, the search engine gets the direct link.

Now, as tedster points out, if different links on business.com have different setups for the source code, that makes it worth checking and rechecking before renewing to make sure you're still getting what you think you're getting. (And I'd go a step further to look at google's cache to see what they are sending to the search engines.)

[ichthyous]

I did notice that the PPC links were handled differently than the directory links, and they are nofollowed. It does seem that google treats this as a direct link since it's already appeared as a link in WMT...whether google devalues the links in its algos is another story

[stevebaik]

The directory listings ($299/yr) are static links. While PPC/sponsored links are redirected.

[RossWal]

Biz.com has (these are my terms for them):

- Inclusion Links ($299)
- PPC Links
- Search Partner Links (Adwords network)

I think the OP was talking about Inclusion links. These should be clean links. The other two are not.

[marina330]

<A HREF="http://www.WebmasterWorld.com/redirect.cgi?f=39&amp;d=3912193&amp;url=http://www.#*$!.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?answer=55593&amp;hl=en_US" TARGET="_top" title="http://www.google.com/support/#*$!analytics/bin/answer.py?answer=55593&amp;hl=en_US">http://www.#*$!.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?answer=55593&amp;hl=en_US</A>

So could any one explain this code? Will the site www.#*$!.com share the link juice of www.WebmasterWorld.com?

[RossWal]

In this example WebmasterWorld has a scripting process that direccts clicks to www.#$C&.com (or whatever it was). Most likely no link juice will flow.