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I.e. your link points to a page that then redirects to the affiliate web site/product. Supposedly this keeps parasite ware from recognizeing and then rewriting the link to steal whatever sale might result.
I'm not currently doing this. My affiliate links are right out there in the open and I'm wondering if I'm losing sales.
So instead of metatag refresh I was toying with the idea of a redirect page (I code in asp). So I have one page, pass it the affiliate URL as a querystring variable and then do a response.redirct to the affilaite url.
I'm wondering though if Goodle will see this as shady even though it's obviously not.
Hey you Google/affilaite experts out there!
Will Googel get mad if I do this? And how much do you think I'm losing to parasites anyway? 10%? 20%? More?
Thanks
Dave
<%
Response.Status = "301 Moved Permanently"
Response.addheader "Location", "http://www.othersite.com/"
Response.End
%>
Notice: I have no experience with this yet. Am testing it over the next month or two.
Any comments from the experts would be appreciated.
I read a suggestion to use meta tag refresh to redirect affiliate links...
I'm not currently doing this. My affiliate links are right out there in the open and I'm wondering if I'm losing sales...Will Google get mad if I do this?...
I wouldn't use meta refresh. I use javascript to redirect when necessary. Even Google has been known to use redirection. Google doesn't like for pages in its index to redirect. The problem here is that your competitors will report you to google as a redirection "spammer". It could get your whole site penalized by Google.
I've been doing affiliate marketing for years. This is the first that I've heard of url "hijacking". If the server is secure how can anyone "hijack" or change the destination url?
If the above server side redirect is employed and there is a text link to the home page above the redirect script, will the home page get PR credit or will the page not be counted in light of the redirect?
I use redirect sometimes. I built a site using virtual hosting. It turned up #1 in Google for its primary search term. Since it was #1 I went ahead and licensed the domain name for it. Since the original site used underscores (http://host-domain.com/search_term_in_url) and underscores are not legal in domain names I had to license [search-term-in-url.com....] The original home page had a PR4 at the time. The javascript redirect to the new home page is in the <head></head> area of the page.
1. The original home page is still indexed by Google with a PR3 showing in the toolbar
2. The original home page url is still showing in the backward links to the new home page (Does this mean that it has a PR4 and not PR3 as displayed in the toolbar? The backlinks are only supposed to show referring pages with a PR4 or higher).
3. Clicking on the cache also redirects to an image of the new home page. All of this is what I want and I feel perfectly justified because I don't want visitors to see the old site but don't want to lose hard earned PR.
4. BTW,the new site is now ranking #5 for the same term that the original site ranks #1.
