Link Masking or URL Redirects

2 posts by 2 authors in: Forums > CMS Builder
Last Post: December 12, 2012   (RSS)

By sidcam - December 10, 2012

I'm downloading MLS real estate listing data to my CMSB site. Three of the fields allow the listing agents to post URL's to externally hosted unbranded virtual tours, property videos, etc. The content is nice for people visiting the site, but I don't suspect they're good for my site's SEO- the outbound URL's are long and ugly and the content is seldom, if ever, indexed.

Example: http://idx.imprev.net/03782F07/10/59910/1739964/index.ipv

I was thinking it might make sense to try and hide the URL's with a redirect or masking script. Thoughts? Any ideas on how it could be done in CMSB?

The solutions I'm finding online are mostly designed for affiliate marketing and require a lot of manual set up to map the fields. Because I'm dealing with thousands of records that change daily I have to have a fully automated solution that just knows a link to "mysite.com/redirect/<records-mls-number>-1/" (or a shortened URL that's coded to say the same thing) searches for the record with the matching mls-number then redirects to the data in the field <virtual-tour1>, etc.

Has anyone done anything like this? Is it even worth worrying about?

Thanks, Sid