In one of my last articles I explained you what was the robotx.txt file and what you could to put into it. One of the lines was:

Disallow: /go/    This directory contains something very interesting I’m going to talk about soon

What is this directory? Why I disallow the access to it directory? This is a trick lot of marketers use to hide their affiliate links or at least to avoid the ugly appearance this links usually have when you use them directly.

Imagine that you are paid for every sale a certain amount. Logically the company gave you an special link (your affiliate link) to know when you send them customers through it. This link could look like the following:

http://companyname.com/track/ref=23324&aff=ffi39d

This kind of links don’t look nice, it is obvious that is an affiliate one. But there is a way, very simple indeed, to disguise this situation. Write a php file for this offer, you should have one file per offer. Name it companyname.php for instance and save it in a directory named go in your root folder. Then you have to place the affiliate link into it like I’m going to show with our link above:

<? header(”Location: http://companyname.com/track/ref=23324&aff=ffi39d“); ?>

Ok, you got it, now every time you want to place your link in a post you only have to use one of these links:

/go/companyname.php or http://yoursite.com/go/companyname.php

Tha’ts easy, isn’t it? This way it is not obvious that you are using an affiliate link, more than that, it looks like it is pointing to another page of your site when actually it points to a landing page.

Why I disallow the access to the go directory in my robots file? Because every time a crawler follow one of my affiliate links it counts as a click through when actually the crawler is not a customer. This ruins the stats a bit so it is better to deny the crawlers the access to my go directory with all the affiliate links I have in it.

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