Redirecting Links for Advertisement or Affiliate Links

Why Redirect Links?

Sometimes, you were given a long jumbled up URL as a referral link such as http://www.example.com/exa/example.php?theurl=dxg_32zxxd345; not only it is hard to remember, but it also reduces your chance of growing your customer base from word of mouth or offline advertising. Imagine if you look at an advertisement in your local newspaper, the business is online based and thus, they are dropping in this kind of URL. How many people do you think will spend their time actually typing this kind of link word-by-word? Most probably they will google it away instead.

How to Start Redirecting Links

There are three most common approaches that I use to redirect links.

1. Using META Redirect. By this method, you should create an HTML page that contains a meta refresh tag. The tag is written in this format <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; url=your URL">. For example, you wanted to redirect a request to http://www.example.com/about-us.php using the URL www.example.com/about.html.  What you need to do is create an about.html page and pu the content as  <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; url=http://www.example.com/about-us.php"> and upload it to the root of your site. Now, anytime there is a request for about.html, it will be redirected to about-us.php.
2. Using 301 redirect. If your web hosting is providing you with a cPanel control panel, you can easily do this by accessing "manage redirect" menu or anything similar.
3. Using 301 redirect through an .htaccess file. If your web hosting allows you to modify and use .htaccess file, you can easily redirect using an additional Redirect 301 <source> <destination> in your .htaccess file. Using the same example as META redirect, you can simply add the line "Redirect 301 /about.html http://www.example.com/about-us.php" to your .htaccess file and voila! you're done.
4. If you are using wordpress, use goCodes plugin. GoCodes plugin will redirect specific requests to your custom URL. You can download goCodes plugin from webmaster source website

Now start making your redirection beautiful! And this site obviously needs some clearing up as well =p

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