How to "nofollow" paid advertising with internal redirect

How to "nofollow" paid advertising with internal redirect - If a page has internal and external outgoing links to redirecting URLs, it’s returning 3xx (301, 302, etc.) HTTP status codes standing for redirection. This issue means that the page does not exist on a permanent or temporary basis. It appears on most of the popular web browsers, usually caused by a misconfigured website. However, there are some steps you can take to ensure the issue isn’t on your side. You can find more details about redirecting URLs by reading the Google Search Central overview. In this article, we’ll go over how you can fix the How to "nofollow" paid advertising with internal redirect error on your web browser. Problem :

We have a site which includes paid banner and sidebar ads (not part of an advertising network). The ads are simple images/gifs which are linked to the advertiser's (external) site.

The links go through an internal redirect like:

example.com/advert-redirect?id=123&url=http://advertiser.com.

What's the most appropriate way to apply a nofollow on this type of link?

I'm concerned that search engines will see this as a nofollow on internal links (when they're actually not).

One possible solution is to use robots.txt to block example.com/advert-redirect. Is this a suitable option?

Solution :

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).

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*

We hope that this article has helped you resolve the redirects, advertising, nofollow error in your web browsers. Enjoy browsing the internet uninterrupted!