Forum Moderators: martinibuster
Their site is www.mydomain.com.
When I scroll over the anchor text, the link path shows on the bottom nav as:
www.mydomain.com/rd/blah, blah
Yet, when I click it, it goes to my site.
Will I still credit for this awesome link, or are they pulling shennanigans?
I guess it would help if I could understand the difference. It would seem to me that the "shennanigans" way redirects the visitor from the landing page to an intermediary page before sending them on to my site. So therefore, I would only get the credit from the intermediary site.
Does that sound right?
It's very probable that this is a call to a database containing a link library which responds by doing a redirect to your site.
There is no way a bot will be able to make any sense of it so it's useless to you.
I had the same thing happen to me. Some Webmasters use this trick to get lots of inbound links (as pretended reciprocals) but withholding the PR it gets them by not linking 'properly' to the other site. So they get a high PR, you get nothing.
header check
Copy and paste the full URL in here (including the redirect script - exactly the link as it appears on the other website):-
[webmasterworld.com...]
See what code it returns. If it's a 302, that tells any "client" (browser or bot) that it's a page which has been "moved temporarily - and here's the new location". In that case, it's likely to have an effect in the SERPs, eventually.
Mileage will vary. Some bots will crawl some redirect scripts. Google recently got into quite a bit of bother over it's handling of 302's when controlled via a redirect (common in many CMS systems' links modules).
So it might help, it might not. Ideally you want a pure text link, but you should at least enjoy the traffic (assuming it's an on-topic link) and exposure.
But always worth checking out the returned header anyway.
A 301 is good - a 302 is OK now (I think - certainly wasn't six months ago).
Here are google's guidelines as to how redirects can cause problems, and the errors they can generate (causing googles bot to stop crawling further in that direction):-
Redirect error - Google was unable to completely follow the redirects from this page. Our guidelines suggest that you make every page on your site reachable from at least one static text link, so that we can access these pages easily.Below are some suggestions about using redirects:
Minimize the number of redirects needed to follow a link from one page to another.
Make sure your redirect timer is set for a relatively short period of time.
Avoid using meta refreshes in the <head> statement of your pages.
Redirect loop error - Google began following the redirect but was directed to the same URL more than once. Check to make sure that your redirects don't point to themselves.
Redirect URL too long - Google encountered a redirect URL that was longer than the suggested maximum in RFC 2616 (255 bytes). Make sure you aren't automatically appending information to the URL (such as a session ID) when you do a redirect. Also make sure that your site allows search bots to crawl your site without session IDs or arguments that track their path through the site.
Invalid redirect - Google followed a redirect from this page but was unable to access that URL. Make sure that your redirects point to valid pages.
Empty redirect - Google found a redirect on this page, but it didn't point to anything, so the Googlebot couldn't follow it. Make sure that all of your redirects are valid and not empty.
I suspect that most other spiders operate on similar principles.
TJ
Matt Cutts (google engineer) had the following to say about 302 redirects:-
Google is moving to a set of heuristics that return the destination page more than 99% of the time. Why not 100% of the time? Most search engine reserve the right to make exceptions when we think the source page will be better for users, even though we’ll only do that rarely.
TJ
