Affiliate Redirect Links getting indexed

[sportsfreak]

Hi,

I have a question on something I just realized. When checking one of my sites indexed pages on Google I just found out that suddenly some of my affiliate links which I am redirecting are appearing in the serps. I am quite a newbie when it comes to the technical side of things so I would like to know if this is bad, how it can be changed and actually why these links suddenly appear (I dont think they were indexed before...).

Thank you so much!

[mooonkey]

Leave it, it doesnt hurt you...

[WATP]

Hey.

How are you redirecting them? Are you using the raw "bookiedotcom / ? affid=" style link or a .html or .php redirect? I've seen this happen occassionally with all 3 methods, not for myself, but I've seen sometimes an affiliate code or a redirect appear on page 1 for a bookmaker in both Bing and Google. Usually they get removed after a while and you can probably make any manual adjustments via GoogleWebmasterTools.

Here's a few things you can do! I've used "bookielink" for now to denote the redirect link regardless of which version it is.

Make sure the outbound links on your pages have the following tag on them <a href="bookielink" rel="nofollow">Click Here to visit...</a> - this tells search engines to not follow the link out.

If you are using a .html refresh redirect (one of those "now loading WilliamHill..." style pages) make sure to add <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW"> inside the <head>... </head> part of the html on the page that refreshes the link to visit the bookie/casino.

One last thing, if you already have all your redirect links in a folder such as "/out/", you can make a file called 'robots.txt', use FTP or whatever to stick it in the root folder on your domain and add the following to prevent the search engines from doing anything within that folder:

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /out/

Hope that helps mate!

[DanHorvat]

In your robots.txt file, add the list of directories you don't want indexed. This is an example of a robots.txt file for a Joomla site with a /link directory containing redirected aff links:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /administrator/
Disallow: /cache/
Disallow: /cli/
Disallow: /components/
Disallow: /includes/
Disallow: /installation/
Disallow: /language/
Disallow: /link/
Disallow: /libraries/
Disallow: /logs/
Disallow: /media/
Disallow: /modules/
Disallow: /plugins/
Disallow: /templates/
Disallow: /tmp/

[sportsfreak]

Thanks guys,

I just edited the robots.txt and hope it will do the trick. Still confused though why this suddenly happened or maybe I really just didnt notice. Actually I am working with a flytonic theme and the redirects there are automatically domain and then /visit/bla so I just entered the /visit/ in the robots.txt. I hope thats correct.

Thanks again!

[DanHorvat]

If the links are already indexed you might have to manually deindex them in the Google Webmaster Tools, meaning, ask for their removal from the SERPs.

No new links will be indexed now when the folder is disallowed but these that were already indexed will stay indexed.

[sportsfreak]

If the links are already indexed you might have to manually deindex them in the Google Webmaster Tools, meaning, ask for their removal from the SERPs.

No new links will be indexed now when the folder is disallowed but these that were already indexed will stay indexed.

Glad you mentioned that, I wouldn't have done that, thx again.

[-Shay-]

If they are YOUR affiliate links, why in the world would you want them to be de-indexed?

Are they ranking or getting clicks? If so, leave them alone, count your blessings, and let the money machine print!

[tryme]

Shay pretty much summed up my own feeling on this. Smile, hope for plenty of clicks because this is the type of thing Google is sure to resolve fairly quickly!

[nsawins]

If they are YOUR affiliate links, why in the world would you want them to be de-indexed?

Are they ranking or getting clicks? If so, leave them alone, count your blessings, and let the money machine print!

LOL +1. Really, why would someone have a problem with this? That's a gift we all would love to have.