: How to "nofollow" paid advertising with internal redirect We have a site which includes paid banner and sidebar ads (not part of an advertising network). The ads are simple images/gifs which

@Odierno851

Both will work, and both will help you in paid advertising.

The nofollow link is nofollow, it's don't care weather it is external or internal. It do same thing.

Special note : Google can crawl Nofollow links, so if they land on some advertising website, and see malicious and not safe content, then it might hurts your website. But it will be fine for most of paid advertising, when the landing page is good.

The robots.txt is something I recommended it in your case, because it completely block the Google spider. Google own ads network use robots.txt because if they use nofollow links, then it can be crawled and land on different website, based on Google User Agent, IP address, and device.

I know you're not redirecting anything, but you're using internal links redirect which is very very easily handle by below robots.txt

User-agent: *
Disallow: /advert-redirect*

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@Shelton105

Yes, this will work, but I do not understand what are you concerned about. Paid links/banners etc. should have nofollow tag (at least according to Google's guidelines, but that's something completely different). Technically, it does not matter whether you have it as link attribute or redirect via disallowed directory.

Another option is to use X-Robots-Tag as a custom header. This approach is even better, because you are not disclosing in robots.txt what you don't want search engines to see/index (this is to protect mainly from your competition).

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