click through tracking URL's what affect on PR.

Do links to track clicks then redirect to domain URL affect the ratings

[kiwibum]

We are currently in the middle of redeveloping an old popular directory based site. The old site was all managed by us, visitors would request us to add links, news, classifieds etc. This is very resource intensive so we have been redeveloping the site with a content management system and membership based so visitors may join and add their own items.

One thing that has come to my attention is the possible problems the redirection links we use to track click throughs on our advertising (AdWords style text) and other items will cause. Anything that is a link to an external URL goes through a internal redirect link so we can track the clicks for the member. e.g. link user sees www.oursite.com/memberitem/ClickingCountingPage user is redirected to www.membersSiteURL.com

People want to put their items links etc with us to help their SE rankings. Will these redirects affect the members number of links to their site counted by Google etc? Obviously if it's not counted as an extra link because of the redirect people wont want to list with us and we need to change how we do this in the new version.

This question has come about from a couple of requests for "direct link" advertising rather than wanting to use our targeted AdWords style ad which we charge on the click through. Makes it very difficult to charge for as they don't want to pay the price for a permant type advertising link.

[WebDevInfo]

I doubt it'll affect their PR. Even if your link was something like www.yoursite.com/memberitem/click.cgi?trackingid=34534, Google still lists URLs like that (most other SEs don't).

To be on the safe side though, keep the links as SE friendly as possible.

[kiwibum]

Thanks for this, have been looking through our log files and have found refereals to our site from searches in Google and Yahoo that link to banner ads on the site. So it seams to be working ok, puts client in top 3 positions on Google. Advantage to leaving it this way is we still get paid if someone finds it in a SE. We can also show how our advertising is helping to get results as it has our domain in the URL but the client gets the visitors. Might make the directory links direct though as you have suggested.

[bonanza]

kiwibum,

You should probably read this thread:
Can Google follow a php link in a directory listing? [webmasterworld.com] As well as the threads referenced within.

The examples and experiences that people have posted about seem pretty solid. And depending on how you code your redirects, you may or may not be passing PR to the sites listed in your directory.

[kiwibum]

bonanza
Thanks for the links to the other threads about this. Yes we had found that redirects are 302 temporary and we get the credit for them. Going to make all links permanent 301 redirects and leave the adverts as 302 for now. Thanks again for your reply and have a great day.