HTML and PHP Redirects

W

wi11iam

Junior Member

Jan 8, 2012

123

55

• Jul 11, 2012

• #1

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?

 

L

loki_

Registered Member

May 20, 2012

63

8

• Jul 11, 2012

• #2

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.

 

D

DeathWisher

BANNED

Jul 11, 2012

32

3

• Jul 11, 2012

• #3

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

 

A

annapaquin

Newbie

Oct 24, 2009

15

1

• Jul 15, 2012

• #4

it can be a permanent option

 

C

csguy

BANNED

Jul 13, 2012

396

43

• Jul 16, 2012

• #5

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

 

C

cuteprinces

Registered Member

Apr 27, 2008

52

1

• Jul 26, 2012

• #6

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

 

R

rclai

Newbie

Feb 22, 2012

26

5

• Jul 27, 2012

• #7

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 .

 

V

VaderD

Newbie

Aug 14, 2012

18

0

• Aug 14, 2012

• #8

yeah thanks

 

soma56

Regular Member

Jun 16, 2009

275

158

• Aug 18, 2012

• #9

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

Regular Member

Apr 9, 2008

475

85

• Aug 24, 2012

• #10

rclai said:

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 .

Click to expand...

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?

 

S

shareware2009

Newbie

May 9, 2012

18

3

• Aug 29, 2012

• #11

i used to use php redirects but dont anymore