PHP Redirection better than Nofollow?

[BloggerGuy]

Hello, if I have affiliate outbound links in my blogs, what's better in terms of SEO, to use PHP Redirection or Nofollow for those links?

For example, instead of using nofollow for the outbound affiliate links, I can use some plugin for WordPress that does this:

mydomain.com/affiliatesitename1 -> redirects to the affiliate link1.

mydomain.com/affiliatesitename2 -> redirects to the affiliate link2.

mydomain.com/affiliatesitename3 -> redirects to the affiliate link3.

Is this better?

Thanks.

[FedeEinhorn]

Both will actually have the same effect as long as you nofollow your affiliate links directly or the PHP script that does the redirection is disallowed via the robots.txt + makes a 302 redirect.

The downside of using nofollow is that you can't track the hits on those links from your end, but with PHP you can save that into a DB or any file.

Hope that helps!

[customerparadigm.com]

My hunch is that if you use the method you just outlined, where:
mydomain.com/affiliatesitename1 -> redirects to the affiliate link1

... you are essentially creating the equivalent of a followed, 301 redirect from your site to their site, and passing along link value as a result.  It would appear to me that this would be a followed link.  Depending on the number of redirects, a percentage of the link value may be lost as a result.  But if that is what you would like to do, then go ahead and do so.

But a better practice would be to no-follow those links, as they are outbound affiliate links.

Hope this makes sense?
Thanks,
Jeff

[FedeEinhorn]

Hey Jeff, probably if there's a plugin designed to specifically redirect affiliate links I bet it already does a 302 redirect while suggesting to add the disallow in the robots.txt (or even adding itself).

[customerparadigm.com]

Federico - Sure... if it does that as part of the plugin, then it should be good to go...

[BloggerGuy]

Excellent points and advice, thanks everyone for answering.