: Is it a good SEO practice to send external links through an uncrawlable redirect script? I am just wondering if it is a good practice to hide external links from search engines? What I mean

@Heady270

You should use a link redirect script for any of the following:


You want to track the clicks in your server logs
Search engines don't want to see the links because they are paid
You don't want the sites you are linking to to rank better because you link to them


Link redirectors are most commonly used for advertising. In that case tracking is essential for payments and Google requires that the links not pass Pagerank. Link redirector scripts are not the only method that can be used in this case. using rel=nofollow on the links prevents pagerank passing and clicks can be tracked using JavaScript and analytics packages.

If you are linking to a competitor, you could consider using a redirector script or rel=nofollow.

Beyond these use cases, I see little value in redirector scripts. They won't conserve link juice on your site. Google's Pagerank algorithm now drops link value equally for plain links, nofollow links, and links blocked by robots.txt

MediaFire and Google drive links are fine to let search engines crawl. They are not sponsored, and having the links on your site won't hurt your rankings in any way.

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@Si4351233

What you propose could be argued as blackhat SEO which can find your ranking negatively affected. At no times should pages or links be cloaked in any way. If you are wanting to prevent ranking passing on to the links then you can add the rel="nofollow" attribute to the links to ensure that they are not followed through to the destination site. If however you do want the link juice to carry on to the destination site then there is no need to do anything and there is no need to cloak the links through a forwarder.

Edit #1 : A re-read of your question after @Stephen Ostermiller's edit clarrifies that you are not actually trying to cloak anything and are simply trying to redirect URL's which is not considered cloaking at all. Best practice is to ensure that the correct 301 redirect header is sent to ensure that any potential ranking signals are sent through for he destination file but that depends on if you want ranking for those files or not.

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@Hamaas447

I think that the safest would be the add a "rel=nofollow" to your cloaked mediafire links if you want to cloak them. How do i know it? This is what happens with many youtube webpages where people add links to sell something in their descriptions under their youtube videos. They are all nofollow and they are often cloaked.

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