Forum Moderators: phranque
This affililate page is uniquely mine, and looks like my site. In the past when I linked directly to my aff site, adwords and overture didn't seem to have a problem with me sending traffic directly to a site that I technically don't own.
I wanted to track the clicks better so that is why I set up the meta refresh--so that the search terms would be in my logs. These pages are not linked to from any pages on my site, only from the PPC ads.
I've read in a couple places that the SE's frown on the meta refresh since apparently it is used by spammers a lot. Theoretically the SEs will knock down your ranking because of this? But since (theoretically) only the overture and adwords bots should see these pages I don't know if it really matters. But then again, I think I've seen regular SE spiders visit me through my ads too.
So I thought that maybe I should just do 301 redirects instead. However, I'm not really sure if this will effect the SE's or the spiders from adwords or overture.
If you do a 301 are the search terms still logged?
Any thoughts on what I am doing, good or bad?
Thanks
Yes, in your server access log file.
> Any thoughts on what I am doing, good or bad?
That's an SEO-type question, and beyond the scope of this forum. However, don't confuse 301 redirects, 302 redirects, and meta-refreshes; They are not at all the same thing. A meta-refresh has no explicit meaning with regard to the status of the requested URL, while a 301 and 302 redirect do. Therefore, a search engine robot that fetches a page with a meta-refresh on it ascribes no meaning to it -- The page must be processed by a 'back-end' program before it is discovered that there is a meta-refresh on it, and that the target of the meta-refresh needs to be injected back into the robot's fetch queue. This complexity and delay is not a problem when you use HTTP 301 and 302 redirects; the robot can process those directly.
Since you're not concerned with the ranking of your affiliate-coded URLs, I doubt there's a problem either way, but I personally use a 301 redirect for my Adwords-tracking URLs.
Jim
