Tracking external links with internal redirect URL - best practice?

Question

We operate a site that lists service providers and serves as a lead generation platform for them, specifically via external links that point to our partners. (~90% of our pages contain 1-3 such external links, which we'll ultimately reduce to around ~15-30%.)

To track the clicks on these links, we currently use Google Analytics with custom Events (via JavaScript). But we want to build a custom solution in our backend so that we can easily generate performance reports for our clients.

Ideally, instead of linking to www.ourclient.domain directly, we'd have internal URLs like www.ourwebsite.domain/redirect?target=www.ourclient.domain, i.e. a redirect URL that takes the target as an HTTP GET parameter.

The question is: What is best practice for implementing redirects to external sites, specifically from an SEO perspective?

I've seen some sites implement this with a 307 Temporary Redirect, which seems in violation of the standard. Other sites to render a page (with a HTTP 200 status code) that contains a redirect via META tags or JavaScript.

So what is best practice? Has Google perhaps even given guidance on this?

Answer 1

Your strategy for a redirect URL is a good one, and it will allow you to use custom GA code to report on the leads.

If your goal is to prevent link juice from passing to the advertiser's domains, here is some info:

1. 301 redirects pass link juice.

2. There is controversy as to how much link juice 302 redirects pass. Some sources say none, some sources say all, and some sources say some.

3. 307 redirects also likely pass link juice similarly to a 302.

4. Meta Refresh javascript likely passes some, but not all link juice.

5. Javascript redirects probably pass a little link juice.

Google Webmaster Guidelines state that you shouldn't sell followed links. As a result, you really don't want Google to be following advertiser links regardless of how you redirect to them on your website. You should be adding "nofollow" tags to these links.

If your redirect url is www.ourwebsite.domain/redirect?target=www.ourclient.domain/page.html, because this URL clearly isn't temporary and will never redirect to a different page, I would use a 301 permanent. If you ever have plans of redirecting www.ourwebsite.domain/redirect?target=www.ourclient.domain/page.html to a different page like www.ourclient.domain/page-different.html then I would use a 302 temporary.

You can also tell Google not to crawl the ?redirect parameter at https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/crawl-url-parameters?hl=en&siteUrl= Set the Which URLs with this parameter should Googlebot crawl? to No Urls