HTML and PHP Redirects

[wi11iam]

I've found a number of sites that rank highly (first page) that use HTML and PHP redirects for their affiliate links. Then they use robots.txt to block the crawlers and rel="nofollow" on the links.

Is this just a temporary thing that won't work for long, or is this standard practice?

 

[loki_]

definitely temporary. On paper it should do the trick. However I met a guy who develops bots for one of the larger search engines. He said that if a bot sees robots.txt and nofollow it won't visit it. At first. It would eventually come back later with different user agent sometimes and see what is on the other side. I would imagine all search engines are doing the same.

 

[DeathWisher]

Temporary only because it can do the trick, every webmaster knows that.

 

[annapaquin]

it can be a permanent option

 

[csguy]

What's wrong with doing a 301 to an affiliate link?

 

[cuteprinces]

def its temp, but who cares if it can work for long term

 

[rclai]

I have developed a WP plugin for a shortcode that will hide the anchor tag of a link without hiding the content it encapsulates. It hides the anchor tag when G crawls the page. It works quite nicely. When the page with those affiliate links get crawled and cached, it'll look like it was just plain text and not links .

 

[VaderD]

yeah thanks

 

[soma56]

I wonder then if you could simply figure out a way to modify things ever so slightly as a means of tricking the search engine into thinking it's the first time coming across that link. You could create a cron to 'alter' things (page, link, robots.txt, etc.) every 6 hours as a means of staying ahead of the spiders. This, in theory, would always give the impression to the spider that it was the first time coming across that link - and hence create a repetitive illusion loop of sorts in terms of being temporary...? Just a thought...

 

[upl8t]

I have developed a WP plugin for a shortcode that will hide the anchor tag of a link without hiding the content it encapsulates. It hides the anchor tag when G crawls the page. It works quite nicely. When the page with those affiliate links get crawled and cached, it'll look like it was just plain text and not links .

What happens when Google crawls the page again without the Google user agent? This is how they catch cloaking. Are you cloaking by ip or user agent when you do this?

 

[shareware2009]

i used to use php redirects but dont anymore