Google SEO - Affiliate links redirects and cloaking

[qimqim]

Hi

I was trying to enter the "Google SEO" section but it asks me to log in and then log in again... ad infinitum...

I'm interested infinding out the difinitive answer to the question of redirecting affliate links to a separate internal folder. According to what I have read from Google's Webmasters Guidelines this seems to be confused with cloaking and

Cloaking refers to the practice of presenting different content or URLs to human users and search engines. Cloaking is considered a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines because it provides our users with different results than they expected.

Now, if I redirect the link to another folder from where the original link is called and the expected page is diaplayed, I cannot see how the user is misled. He/she gets what was expected.

There is also a lot of talk online about changing the url. Here, again I cannot see any deception if the final result is ONLY the page that was expected.

Is there a Google contact where I can get a definite answer to this?

Your comments will be welcome.

[aakk9999]

Google SEO section is for supporters (paying subscribers) of WebmasterWorld, this is why it asked you to login again.

With regards to your question, I cannot see a problem if you are redirecting both, visitors AND Googlebot.

Or is there something I am missing which gives you a particular reason to have a concern?

[qimqim]

Hi

Let me give you an example that I coded 2 days ago just to test. In the following page there are 2 affiliate links in the sidebar.

<snip>

One redirects to a file wher each line is related to a different link. It is ina different folder protected by the robots.txt. The redirection in the main page is rel="nofollow". When the visitor presses the lonk, like you can see, he/she is sent directly to the page taht is expected. No funny bussiness.

The other one uses something I found online based in frames from aclocker.com. It does pretty much the same with 2 differences: I need one extra html file for each redirection, which are kept in the same protected folder. The big advantage of this one is that it masks the url. It still goes where it is supposed to go, with no funny business in-beteen BUT it changes the url that can be visualized. What for? if you google for a hotel and land on my page, you may bookmark it for later comparison with others, and if you decide to book mine, you use the bookmark and land directly in the hotel website. DGoodbye commission! If you change the url to my own, the bookmark brings the visitor back to me. Ideal. As far as I am concerned I am not taking the visitor where he/she does not want to go. The visitor gets what is expected with nothing in-between.

But what would Google have to say? I looked at the Webmasters Guidelines and what it says does not seem to go against what I would like to do

Cloaking refers to the practice of presenting different content or URLs to human users and search engines. Cloaking is considered a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines because it provides our users with different results than they expected.

[edited by: aakk9999 at 1:20 pm (utc) on Feb 11, 2015]
[edit reason] No URLs please, describe problem in words instead [/edit]

[not2easy]

The first method you describe is commonly used and accepted by Google - no problem, the second method described doesn't sound like a great idea. Cloaking is clearly described by Google and that's not what you're doing.

Cloaking is showing the robots one thing and showing non-robots something different: [support.google.com...]

[qimqim]

Hi not2easy.

Thanks for the input.

I would have thought that in both cases I am NOT showing Google what I show the visitor beacuse of the rel="nofollow" shouls stop Google from eseeing what I intend to show the visitor.

From that I would have thought that I could not be accused of providing the "users with different results that they expectwed".

But I have to accept that you know a lot more about it than I do.

[not2easy]

If the visitor is automatically redirected to a page full of ads or images and Google is shown a plain page full of text instead of being automatically redirected to the same page as a visitor is, that is cloaking and is against the guidelines. It is a different matter if you do no want a link followed or some folder to be crawled.

Google plainly says (said):

Not all paid links violate our guidelines. Buying and selling links is a normal part of the economy of the web when done for advertising purposes, and not for manipulation of search results. Links purchased for advertising should be designated as such. This can be done in several ways, such as:

* Adding a rel="nofollow" attribute to the <a> tag
* Redirecting the links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file

So those are links for advertising and the methods they outline above are how they say to deal with it. That is not cloaking.

Strange note - the snippet I quoted above was at

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66736&ctx=sibling

, but now it redirects me to

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66356

where it has some, but not all of the same text.

[qimqim]

Hi not2easy

It's the end of the day and the brain is tired...

Are you then saying that redirecting the link to an internal folder and serving it from there (the page will be identical to what Google would see if it disobeyed the robots.txt) is perfectly ok?

And that clesning the url to make it more attractive and based on my site would also be ok?

In other words: the page that you saw earlier with two different methods of redirecting are, as far as you are believe, ok with Google?

Sorry, but even at the best of times I need things hammered into my old brain...

[not2easy]

Same thing that was said before:

The first method you describe is commonly used and accepted by Google - no problem, the second method described doesn't sound like a great idea. Cloaking is clearly described by Google and that's not what you're doing.

Cloaking is against the guidelines, what you described is not cloaking, it is commonly done, recommended by Google and not harmful to your site.

[qimqim]

the second method described doesn't sound like a great idea

.
but you go on to say that what I do is not cloaking and "reccomended by Google...

So, why ius it not a good idea? Sorry, but I read it in two different ooposite senses.