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Don't do it. Very bad idea. Consern your efforts with buildingt stronger links.

Hi Barry, As I said in my response, I used tools to check for the headers returned by the URL, the same information that is returned to search engine spiders. There no way to know how the PHP script is made, for me, or for a search engine spider, as the PHP is executed server side and all you get back are the HTTP headers and content. The url doesn't contain any id, it's simply the redirection url that is passed to it so the script probably look like this : header('Location: '.$_GET['url'], true, 301); ?> If the redirect.php file was receiving an ID instead of a direct URL, it would probably look more like this : // stuff to connect to the database here include('connect.php'); //a long line not well constructed that does a lot of stuff $url = current(mysql_fetch_assoc(mysql_query("SELECT url FROM urls WHERE id=".(int)$_GET['id']))); //redirect to the URL from the database  header('Location: '.$url, true, 301); ?> It could be a way to trick user into thinking that the link is passing juice by doing a 301 redirect but blocking the file using robots.txt wich is not the case, there's also no Set-Cookie. It is more likely to be a way to get statistics about what are the most popular links. For example, redirect.php probably add an entry to a database each time the url is reached to track the number of visitors sent to a particular website. I hope my answer will help you understand the use of the redirect.php and the way it works. If you still have questions, do not hesitate to reply to my response. Best regards, Guillaume Voyer.

Where would you advice getting your links? Blog comments look like spam if your keyword is in the name field and I'm sure google will crack down on this. Emailing webmasters will cost a hell of a lot if you want a lot of links. Directorys are low quality and irelevant!  Where does this leave us in terms of getting links?

Where do you ask them to get links for you? Do you ask them to leave comments on blogs or email webmasters for a link? (if going the email route, surley most webmasters will want a chunk of change to place your link) Regards.

I would be very hesitant to do something like this. If you want to link to something, use a followed link. If you don't trust it, don't link to it. Worrying about "reciprocity" of links in this fashion shouldn't be a concern for users or for search engines. Websites and pages link back and forth to each other all the time - it's a natural activity. It only gets troublesome when you intentionally try to manipulate rankings using "reciprocal link lists" (and I think that's why the word "reciprocal" in linking/SEO has become so maligned and misunderstood). This WB Friday might help - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-sitewide-reciprocal-and-directory-links

I have found it hard to evaluate links on a weekly basis, too. All tools give different results. You need to pick 1 tool, create a spreadsheet, and then track links with that same tool week to week. At least you should know on a relative basis if you're improving or not, even if you're not getting the exact true link count. The Link Analysis tab of SEOmoz shows some stats (external followed links, followed links root domains, unique C-blocks) that are useful to track over time, but they only update about once a month (note to SEOmoz: weekly would be great) The one thing you CAN track week to week is your SERP rankings, on the Rankings tab. You can track number of phrases you have in the top 3, as well as number of phrases on page 1. If your external link building is progressing then those numbers should go up week over week. And those numbers drive your organic search visits per week, which you can view on the Traffic tab, or in Google Analytics directly. As far as follow/no-follow goes, remember that you want a 'normal' anchor text distribution and usually a normal anchor text profile will include some no-follows. So keep some no-follows in there...

#3 or #4. Think of about.com - getting a link or two from an article on there is great, and makes sense to google. Getting a link from the front page (content area) is a great endorsement too. #1 and #2 are easily discounted by bots and users alike as being lower quality.

If the page you're linked from is linked directly from homepage (anywhere from it, including footer) or any other PR6 page on that site it will likely have PR5 (unless the number of outgoing links is excessive, or PR value is barely PR6 - for example PR 4.6). Worst case scenario is PR4 in the next public update (although pagerank is already received in realtime). Typically PR drops one toolbar point each link depth down.

All that, yet I have still secured Yahoo listing for our site. How's that? I'm not saying I had money to throw around but it's basically a significant directory to be in - even outside SEO value. My vote still goes towards yes if the site is important to you and you are not willing to cut corners.

So using this method I don't need to include noindex, nofollow on the subdomain page?

I can provide you with a little anecdote but I think internal linking is a reasonably large factor, especially from the home page. So I have a page, 3 levels deep, absolute tail end of my site and exists exclusively to catch the keyword it's targeting; doesn't provide any information you can't get elsewhere on the site, doesn't have any exclusive offers, just another page on the site. So I build a few links into this page, nothing exciting; articles, links from my blog posts, manage to find a couple of websites about the topic, but after 3 months, nothing, top 50 ranking (from 120 or so) but not that great. However one day I get a conversion from it, so I decide I'm going to give it a little push and link to it with the main keyword from the homepage. Boom! Next day, 7th. The homepage itself isn't that powerful, very low page rank, very few links coming in and there's already about 100 links on it between the nav and the other editorial style links. It's not that the page I linked to wasn't being crawled or indexed but putting a link in from the homepage instantly boosted it. 2 months later the page still fluctuates within the top 10, but I have been building more links into it. So, flush with this new success I decide to test it on another, very similar, site. Same sort of page, same sort of keyword, same sort of site structure. Difference this time is that I'm not building links to the page in question. Keyword isn't top hundred so I put the link in from the home page. Boom! Top 80. Alright, not as good but a definite twitch. I figure that it's not quite the magic bullet I thought it was (and realistically I can't link to every page from my home page anyway) and haven't really revisited what would happen if I did build links to that page (and a few more to the homepage). So, anecdotally, internal linking from recent pages and small time link building doesn't do much. Linking from the homepage is a big signal that a page is important. Without external links your internal linking (on a small / low DA website) isn't going to rank you. I'm going to say it's closer to 20/80 though.

Thanks, Barry!  That last paragraph is rich and very helpful.  Google won't likely look at an individual case like this because they are trying to fix this kind of problem by tweaking algorithms...  Makes perfect sense.  I'll likely make the report but set my expectation levels low. Thanks to everyone for the great, quick feedback on my question!

Thanks! So many things that i can do. Thanks for such a good information.

OSE index is limited however it may be the case that your other site's links get indexed more thoroughly next time.