Filed Under: Articles, SEO, Linking Strategy
Want a sneakier way to link to other sites? Worry about Page Rank? Or think your linking partners are cheating on you? Here’s a different linking strategy involving redirects and blocking search engine robots!
Following up on Matt Cutts’ Seeing Nofollow Links, there are way sneakier ways to get around this for someone who are extremely protective about his or her links for whatever reason.
I’m not a catholic, but I still don’t believe in using condoms. Personally, I spread my link loving to whoever ask for it and deserves it — in this case Matt. Only in rare cases, where you want to protect yourself should you use the condom, like if you’re linking to a bad neighborhood.
Anyhow, where was I going with this post. I’m about to show you a way to protect yourself from “leaking” Page Rank (if you’re a tin foil hat wearing individual that still believe in that), or how you can avoid linking to a merchants site if you’re doing some affiliate marketing (Greg’s post is actually very interesting). Or just use a different linking strategy than what most do.
The Sneaky Block and Redirect Link Technique
Ok, so here’s what you do. Say you have a directory where you review other sites, you’re a publisher for an affiliate program or some scheme where you link to a lot of sites. Normally, you’d get an URL with perhaps a tracking code in it. And normally, you’d just link directly to the destination URL.
But what if you had a directory, say /urltracker/ on your site with individual pages with redirects for each URL? First of all, you can keep track of how many clicks you get for each URL before you redirect to the destination URL.
What happens is that the visitor comes to your site, click on a link that points to the corresponding page under the /urltracker/ dirctory and then gets redirected to the desination URL via a 302 or JavaScript or whatever you choose. It really doesn’t matter, because here comes the sneaky part:
Add a disallow rule for the /urltracker/ directory in your robots.txt!
This means that absolutely no links in your /urltracker/ directory will be indexed nor followed, thus not passing on link loving. The morale of this story is that you should be aware of what reciprocal linking schemes, linking models your affiliate marketing publishers use and a lot more. How can you check if someone’s doing this? Check if they redirect, and if so, check the HTTP Headers!
If you want to disccuss this further, or have any ideas about this, please leave a comment, or even drop by the Annual Affiliate Marketing Networking Dinner in Vancouver.
Sverre Sjøthun
2 Comments so far
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On the surface that sounds good, but I wonder if being excluded from the index necessarily means that those pages will not be spidered and the links followed. I have a feeling it doesn’t. However, a little log analysis will answer that once and for all.
By oddcomments on 03.27.06 11:04 pm | Permalink
I’ve seen a linking setup like this in full swing on a huge portal/reference site(a real reference site, not just spam), and the site in question rank exceptionally well for exceptionally competitive keywords.
They have tons of quality content, tons of incoming links and hardly any outbound ones because of their redirect strategy.
By Sverre Sjothun on 03.27.06 11:10 pm | Permalink
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