This may be a bit old hat but I am trying to determine why some of my sites have tanked lately, and although I know that it might be several factors at play I think a good place to start is the common factors they all share which has made me think of affiliate redirects.
I know there are different ways of doing this, but post Panda and post Penguin 2.0 which way works best?
At the moment I have links going to a php file in a folder which holds a variable with the link, which includes a file using a meta refresh which redirects the user to where they want to go. I also get to track this using web analytics. The user sees a 'You are being redirected to..." type message and I know how many times the page has been visited.
I set this up years ago and never thought twice about it since but I'm beginning to get the feeling this could be part of my woes.
Would I be better off redirecting using 301 redirects at folder level? Using .htaccess? How can 301 redirects be tracked? Or is it now better to just display the links with nofollow?
Thanks
