Hiding outgoing links on a website

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Hiding outgoing links on a website

tpb101

7:14 pm on Nov 24, 2015 (gmt 0)

There is a link directory site in a niche that I work in, and it has outgoing links set to something like this:

domain.com/go/target-domain.com

robots.txt looks like this:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /go/
Disallow: /go/*

And when I go to domain.com/go I get a 500 error, and some kind of message get displayed, it looks like it was made by the owner of the site.

So this is hiding the outgoing links in a way, I am not sure what is the purpose of this. Does anybody have an idea what something like this is for. The website (one page) has a lot of links, like 1,000 / 1,500 or more. There is internal pages too, but this is not of interest here.

Thanks.

JDPeters

9:46 pm on Dec 3, 2015 (gmt 0)

Interesting try site:domain and see /go links are indexed or not also check if the directory pages from which link goes are indexed or not.

tangor

1:44 am on Dec 4, 2015 (gmt 0)

As written, the site does not WANT any robot to see the links. Some browsers also honor robots.txt. As this is a directory, they may want to make sure the directory itself is used to view the links.

nakkers

3:08 am on Dec 4, 2015 (gmt 0)

Sounds like some kind of wonky blackhat seo.

not2easy

3:26 am on Dec 4, 2015 (gmt 0)

Or it could be that the site wants to have pretty links and more accurate tracking for "who clicked on what and when" so the actual links reside in a database and are aliased using the /go/example.com which sends the click to http://example.com/12345-real-link/id=111&actual-page.html via 301 redirect. It is not an uncommon practice to prettify links while keeping better tabs on clicks.