Linkage in directory

direct or redirect?

[estaquieto]

Hi, I run a directory of links much like dmoz but concentrates only on a specific country. My problem lies on my redirect script. When someone clicks on a link, the script records the click into a database and then forwards the user to the requested site. My webhost had reported to me that my redirect script has been causing too much strain on my account, and others' as well. Now, I am going to make a decision, whether to keep this script or to just directly take the user straight to the URL. My site has been perofrming fairly well, getting about 1,500 uniques/day, the bulk coming from Google and Yahoo. I would like to know how switching to direct linking will affect the way my pages are ranked and crawled. Any advice will be appreciated. Thank you.

[Iguana]

I have many pages of links to other websites and I generally rank top 3 for the term 'widgets websites' for these few hundered pages - the only thing is these pages don't pass much pagerank on to the internal pages they link to - but I experimented with seeing how much 'feedback' PR affects the other pages and I came to the conclusion that it wasn't very much.

[Woz]

estaquieto

You mention two options:-

1)whether to keep this script or
2)just directly take the user straight to the URL.

There is a third option:-

3) Change Server/Host. If your script is putting that much strain on the server then you are probably on a heavily populated server. Ask you host to move you to a faster or less populated server, or, if they cannot do that, then move to a new host.

>how switching to direct linking will affect the way my pages are ranked and crawled.

I am assuming you are only using the redirect script on outgoing links and not within the site. If that is the case the using or not using the script will have no effect on how the engines crawl your site. Even if you have dynamic URLs for internal navigation, as long as you have enough overall PR to drive the site you should be OK.

Onya
Woz

[estaquieto]

Thanks for your quick responses! I'm gonna go ahead and *risk* removing the redirect script and see how it all turns out.