Web Coding Tutorial #1: Quick And Painless PHP Redirect

Alright, so I feel like this is something that is always made WAY harder than it should be. I've been using this little trick for a few years, and, so far, it's still doing a great job. What we're going to do is set up a simple redirect script.

Here's a quick definition of what an actual redirect is (according to Wikipedia):

URL redirection, also called URL forwarding and the very similar technique domain redirection also called domain forwarding, are techniques on the World Wide Web for making a web page available under many URLs.

So, boil that down, and a redirection is basically a way to reroute web traffic that is unobtrusive, and requires no action from the user. So why do it?

Well, there are a number of reasons to employ a redirect script:

1. To cloak affiliate links
2. To unite misspelled alternatives to your domain
3. To transition to a new domain
4. To unite .com's, .net's, .org's, etc. to one domain
   

Why?

The reason you need your own hosted domain is because we are going to create a simple PHP web page. This page then needs to be uploaded to the desired domain. Let's say you have a product review website, and you recently finished dismantling Traffic Anarchy (not recommended). Being an affiliate for this product, you would like to get traffic to click on your affiliate link. Also, being a webmaster, you really don't want this review page to have any affiliate links on it (PPC will skyrocket).

What To Do?

Suppose your site is called Reviewosaur.com and your affiliate link is http://823b6e7ypmzi8r6a5s-zre9w7q.hop.clickbank.net/. Yep, the dreaded Clickbank link: hated by Google, despised by affiliate-marketing-customers, and a red flag to everyone else. Wouldn't it be great if you could just send people to Reviewosaur.com/traffic-anarchy-review/ or something equally pretty?

Well, lets do just that...

Step 1

First, over at Reviewosaur.com, let's just create a directory called "traffic-anarchy-review."

Step 2

Now, open up notepad and enter this text:

If you're doing this as you're reading, you probably know that the URL after "'Location:" is my affiliate link. You would want to replace this with whichever URL you're wanting to redirect TO. Unless you want to help me with the grocery bill next month...

Now save this file as "index.php" and upload to the newly created directory: in my case it's Reviewosaur.com/traffic-anarchy-review.

Now we test it:

Don't Buy Traffic Anarchy Until You Read My Scathing Review!!

Go ahead, click the Scathing Review...

A couple of things to notice here:

1. When you hover on the link, the innocent looking url is shown on the bottom of the browser.
2. However, when the link is clicked, the affiliate link still shows in the address bar.
   

Now, I'm not sure if Google has updated the Adwords PPC algorithm to take into account these shallow redirects.  If anyone knows, then by all means leave a comment.  The example I showed used an affiliate link, but the exact same technique can be used for any other link.

Just remember, the php script that we created needs to be uploaded to the url you want to bypass.  The file does not have to be named "index.php", you can actually call it "anythingyouwant.php." 

Thanks for reading, and good luck out there!