optimized outbound linking

what's the best way...?

[pardo]

We have a directory website which is build around 'quality' outbound links.

I just cannot decide whether to get the plain url of the outbound website in the anchor tag or use the redirect.asp?id=x method which we use now.

We do this for reasons of tracking / measuring which links are usefull for our visitors.

I wonder this will benefit or hurt our PR. It might hurt for any outgoing link is letting pagerank flow away but i believe more in the other way of the story: if we link to websites that are known as quality/relevant websites within our theme we might increase our authority for our page has some good resources to offer.

Please any advice on this one for it's difficult to choose. I might drop the redirection (in which Google cannot see to what page is linking) instead of the plain url of the outbound website.

[jeremy goodrich]

As long as you aren't explicitly trying to prevent Google from following the redirect, their bot should have no problems.

I agree - getting outbound click data is very useful. :)

[Marcia]

>>redirect.asp?id=x

Have those id= links been showing as backlinks?

[pardo]

Marcia,

I can't tell that for this is the first month in the index and still with some older urls. Last month we have worked hard to a new structure and new content. All those new url's have been noticed by the deepcrawl googlebot so I'm really curious what's happening after the next update.

In the old 'static' version of the pages we had a great PageRank and in that version we didn't used redirects.

The new .net situation (aspx pages) allows us to track that information so we set it up that way. Another advantage of this solution is that our pages are protected from people hyjacking our pages for they don't see any website url's.

But if i have to choose for the benefit of a higher ranking i would show it back again the old static way and try to get the tracking info another way.