On many of your pages you have a space to provide a link, but it says not to use redirects or affiliate links. What is wrong with those links and why can't I use them?
One of the reasons we believe our websites are successful is that we try to present original and interesting information. That includes the sites we link to. Before someone clicks a link they should have an idea of what the website they will be visiting is about.
By offering a little bit of interesting, useful and original information our readers are being presold on whatever your website has to offer. Because we try to keep all the information original on our websites, that means that our readers won't see something and think, "oh, I've seen that on 100s or 1000s of other websites. BORING" and hit the back button.
Now, what does all that have to do with affiliate links and redirects.
Affiliate links: An affiliate link is usually a coded link to someone else's website. If someone clicks the link and makes a purchase you receive a commission. This is a great way to earn money and very profitable for many people.
We encourage you to participate in affiliate programs. However, we do not allow the coded links to be used directly on our websites. The result might be several, hundreds, or even thousands of links all going to exactly the same website. This would simply be unoriginal, uninteresting, useless and boring!
If you are a member of an affiliate program or programs, we encourage you to make your own website(s) that are interesting, useful and original that link to your affiliate programs. You can then link to your websites from ours. A blog is a great style of website that is easy to use.
Of course if you just cut and paste something from the affiliate program website to your website, don't count on your link being added to our website.
Redirects: Redirects are simply a means by which website #1 goes to website #2. A common example would be http://classifieds1000.com redirects to http://www.classifieds1000.com . There is simply no reason to have two identical websites with slight variations in name.
Of course, there would be no reason to promote http://classifieds1000.com instead of the real website at http://www.classifieds1000.com . Therefore we ask that the links you enter are the actual website someone will get when they click the link.
We also understand that some like to cheat the system and use redirects for various nefarious purposes, including adding duplicate links (unoriginal, uninteresting and not helpful or useful), among others. Don't waste our time or yours.
Another common use of redirects is with the so-called tinyurl's. This concept was designed to make very long links into very short links. Useful for emails. Necessary for twitter. However, they are generally unnecessary and uncomfortable.
When you mouse over them you see the short url, not the actual link you will see when clicking. This is often used by spammers in twitter (and elsewhere). Once I saw a twitter post on health with a short url. When I clicked it, I must say the link was nothing about health!
There is no practical limit to the length of the url's in our system, so there is no need to "shorten" it and confuse our readers.
So when entering links, in our directories, forums, blogs, articles or elsewhere, please use the ultimate url for your website.
