Implementing a redirect

[Block19Row13]

Good afternoon all.

We have been approached by a publication that wishes to advertise our site in return for sales commision.

we have an affiliate programme that is well established but so far has only been used online.

they plan to place an ad in their many newspapers.

So we can track taffic and pay the apropriate commision can someone help with the best way to redirect the traffic so that it is logged?

My plan is to...

- provide the publication with a specific url, e.g. www.widgets.co.uk/promotion
- this then takes the user to a page that redirects them to the affiliate url
- the affiliate url then redircts them to our hom page
- the user is logged

would this be the best way to do it?

also, i plan to add the new referal directory to our robots.txt so that search engines cant read it.

your thoughts are very much appreciated

[rocknbil]

IMO the best way to do this is avoid redirecting at all. Can you just put Google Analytics on this landing page?

Otherwise you'd write a small perl, PHP, or asp script that does this for you. The program logic is something like

- receive request at /promotion/index.cgi (or .php, etc.)

- log the data from the request (ip, time, user agent, referrer if any, etc.)

- print "location:destination.html" (or header("destination.html"); )

Given choices, I'd just drop some Analytics code on the page, done. :-)

[Block19Row13]

logging the custome from this page is fine, but we need to place the affiliate cookie on the customers session so that any sales are logged so we can pay commission.

[g1smd]

Make sure that such a landing page cannot be indexed in the SERPs (use meta robots noindex tag) otherwise you'll be paying commission to the other site for visitors arriving from Google and elsewhere.