I'm not sure if I should use a redirect

Posted by Joe on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Joe
Published on 2010-03-24T15:18:54Z Indexed on 2010/03/24 15:23 UTC
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redirect

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php

Hi there,

I have an affiliate link on my webpage. When you click on the link it follows the href value which is as follows:

www.site_name.com/?refer=my_affiliate_id

This would be fine, except that the site offers no tracking for the ads, so I can't tell how many clicks I am getting. I could easily implement my own tracking by changing the original link href value to a php script which increments some click stats in a database and then redirects the user to the original page.

But I have read some articles that say that using redirects may be seen by google as a sign of 'blackhat' techniques and they might rank me lower, unindex my site or even hurt the site that I'm redirecting too.

Does anybody know if this is true, or have any idea of the best way I could go about this?

Many thanks in advance

Joe

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