Getting PR credit for affiliate links

[DavidWood99]

I must have 500 affiliates linking to my site - yet NONE of them show up on Google as backlinks to my site.

Now – I can send people to mysite.com/cmd.asp?a=16456 – and have that page redirect to my shopping cart's affiliate URL so they can set the cookie, and then redirect to the final page.

However, I already do this. And none of my affiliates show up as backlinks for my site.

I've seen a site with a great affilaite program that seems hosted on their server. But if do that it won't integrate with my whole database/shopping cart system that I'm leasing.

How can I get backlink credit (PR) for my affiliate links?

thanks guys,

David

[martinibuster]

A link is a vote for a website. An affiliate link is not a vote for your website, it is a business partnership wherein these websites who are linking to you are working hard to promote you by gaining links, spending money on PPC, etc.

So you should understand that what you are proposing is link manipulation and can be construed as unethical by those who are working hard to promote your sales.

Short cuts are never a good substitute for real work, hard work.

[webmasterworld.com...]

[burcot]

If a webmaster designs a site that revolves around the topic of whirlygigs and then (because he/she does not sell whirlygigs) links to a site that does - surely that must count as a vote!

[neuron]

Most affiliate programs do not give link pop, but I think it's historically been an issue of url complexity and not one of the search engines dealing with it directly. It was broken, why fix it?

Recently however, I've seen the advent of a couple of affiliate networks that do write their affiliate urls in a link-pop spiderable, countable way. I even know of one guy that did his own script to make sure it was unique and do the same thing.

I am pretty confident that google believes that information sites should top the SERPs and that commercial sites should pay to top the SERPs. This is consistent with what search engine reps have been saying.

From what I understand about this, the affiliate link-code changes to get the links indexed will be dealt with in the strongest of measures. If not, I could see affliate programs made just to provide link-pop springing up all over the place.

[DavidWood99]

thanks for all these answers guys. Integrity conversation is interesting.

Neuron - would appreciate if you could give examples of this link-pop, spiderable, countable way that these networks are creating their links. Even point me to them.

Thanks,

David