Too many redirects or redirection loops bad?

[matted]

I'm looking at all the redirects on my site. All the affiliate links are 301 (or in some cases 302) redirect links. Then, I come across something like Bodog:

(I removed my affiliate code from the URL, and added X to the URLs)

xhttp://www.bodog.com/welcome/XXXXXX/sportsbook
redirected to: xhttp://www.bodog.com/sportsbook
status code: 301 (object permanently moved)
This URL is part of a redirection loop:
xhttp://www.bodog.com/welcome/121513/sportsbook
xhttp://www.bodog.com/sportsbook
xhttp://www.bodog.com/sportsbook/
xhttp://sports.bodog.com/sportsbook/
xhttp://sports.bodog.com/
xhttps://www.bodog.com/sso/login?service=http%3A%2F%2Fsports.bodog.com%2Fspor tsbook%2Findex.jsp&gateway=true
xhttp://sports.bodog.com/sportsbook/index.jsp
xhttp://sports.bodog.com/

Is this a problem for SEO on my site or does it not matter?

[ddm]

it's fine for you

301's lose juice, so if there's like 10 hops until it gets to the final dest, it loses a lot of juice.. so bodog get no benefit in your example imo. doubly so if you nofollow the link on your end.

[baldidiot]

Agreed, once the link is external it'll have no affect on your site.

[LiveCasinoPartners]

That's a great question. I've thought a lot about that recently. As sites grow they tend to get bloated with extra banners here and there as well as lot sof "Click Here to PLay" etc..

Having a rel="nofollow" on a link to a site that has redirect loops or internal redirect loops does not mean that google completely ignores it.

Google knows the landscape on an "affiliate" site vs. a "gaming" site. Do they associate a quality site with less outgoing links (including redirected or 301 redirects)? If I was a Google programmer I would certainly take this into consideration.

Since there is no definitive proof I'd say be safe and remove all non-essential banners or outgoing text links regardless of whether they have a rel="nofollow" or not. Find those banners that no one would ever see anyway and delete them.

Link consolidation: Also, here's another strategy I've been using. Let's say you have a table that is dedicated to one affiliate program. There's a banner, text links etc.. that are all close together in the cell or table (or even div for that matter). Instead of having lot of outgoing links you can make a link at the table level and only have one outgoing link for all of the content inside the table cell. For some this could remove quite a bit of outgoing links.

There's no way for sure for me to judge the true effects of the (301) redirects or nofollow attributes without doing extensive tests, which I don't have the time right now. Meanwhile, I'll try to reduce them as much as possible.

[matted]

Nofollow links still cost you link juice, but it goes into thin air, not to the link owner. Fewer is definitely good advice.

My concern is that linking to bad neighborhoods should be worse than getting links in one. My competitor can screw me by signing me up for FFA pages or such - but I control the outbound links on my site... And a link with 5 successive redirects seems sketchy to me. I'm not even sure why Bodog needs that many or knows that is happening.

I'll just leave it as is for now and revisit in a month if my rankings haven't improved from the number of other changes I've made and other things I'm working on.

[best.hands]

Having a rel="nofollow" on a link to a site that has redirect loops or internal redirect loops does not mean that google completely ignores it.

Yep. But as the redirection goes deeper, link juice shared become less. And with the rel="nofollow", that is otherwise that the link is there, however the shared link juice has been totally omitted.

As far as I could remember, if there were 10 links in a page with PR 1. The equal share of each outgoing link will be .10. Putting rel="nofollow" on 5 of the links will not increase the share of the remaining followed links, but the share stays at .10 each as long as there are 10 outgoing links, regardless if followed or not, on the page.

And so, if you think a link is not that worthy to be on the page, take it out and save its share to other links on the page.

With redirection, it is always best to point it directly to the end URL of the redirection loop, if that does not take your referral away.