Hiding outgoing links on a website

[tpb101]

There is a link directory site in a niche that I work in, and it has outgoing links set to something like this:

domain.com/go/target-domain.com

robots.txt looks like this:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /go/
Disallow: /go/*

And when I go to domain.com/go I get a 500 error, and some kind of message get displayed, it looks like it was made by the owner of the site.

So this is hiding the outgoing links in a way, I am not sure what is the purpose of this. Does anybody have an idea what something like this is for. The website (one page) has a lot of links, like 1,000 / 1,500 or more. There is internal pages too, but this is not of interest here.

Thanks.

[JDPeters]

Interesting try site:domain and see /go links are indexed or not also check if the directory pages from which link goes are indexed or not.

[tangor]

As written, the site does not WANT any robot to see the links. Some browsers also honor robots.txt. As this is a directory, they may want to make sure the directory itself is used to view the links.

[nakkers]

Sounds like some kind of wonky blackhat seo.

[not2easy]

Or it could be that the site wants to have pretty links and more accurate tracking for "who clicked on what and when" so the actual links reside in a database and are aliased using the /go/example.com which sends the click to http://example.com/12345-real-link/id=111&actual-page.html via 301 redirect. It is not an uncommon practice to prettify links while keeping better tabs on clicks.