Does this redirect pass any juice?

[conradh]

Does this link pass link juice: http://www.finda.co.nz/redirect.php?listing_id=r2vp&url=http://www.avantifinance.co.nz

[Guest]

This post is deleted!

[G-Force]

Hi Conradh,

The redirection is a 301 Moved Permanently, so it does pass link juice. You can find out using different tools like the followings :

http://www.seoconsultants.com/tools/headers
http://web-sniffer.net/
http://www.g-force.ca/referencement/entetes

But, to know if a link pass any link juice,  there are also multiple things to check. First, check if the page is indexed in Google using site: or cache: command.

If the page is not indexed, it might be only a question of time, but it might also be because it is blocked by robots.txt, robots meta tag or by X-Robots-Tag.

Also, check if the link doesn't have the rel="nofollow" attribute. Any of those variable can prevent the juice to pass other than the type of redirection.

Best regards,
Guillaume Voyer.

[petrakraft]

Here in the learning session you find more information about the "amount" of link juice:

http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection

A 301 Redirect is a permanent redirect which passes between 90-99% of link juice (ranking power) to the redirected page.

[StalkerB]

I've been looking into this but don't have the technical chops to give you a definitive answer.

@Guillaume How can you say conclusively that it passes link juice when you don't know what redirect.php does? Unless you were able to see what it does.

For a straight php redirect to count as a 301 I believe it'd need to look like

header( "HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently" );
header( "Location: http://www.new-url.com" );
?>

However I assume that you can't do these sort of header redirects as you have multiple ids going into the same redirect.php file?

Do you put cookies on people before redirecting them (I assume there's some sort of affiliation reason to redirect this way)?

Without understanding how it works I'm not sure if it does or doesn't pass value, but please make sure you're happy with the information given to you.

[G-Force]

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.