Google points to us using an affiliate's referer

That guy was very lucky, but how should I react if at all?

[antirack]

One of my affiliates was lucky, and Google started to index links to our page now using his affiliate ID (ie. [goldenwidgets.com...]

It might have started by that affiliate linking to us, and Google picked up the URL there. our site is in Google for many years, so I am not sure why their logic would do that. It’s even worse than that, our Google ranking is very high due to the high traffic and relevant keywords. So he scores double ;-)

It's not that I mind having people buying from us, but somehow this isn't what was supposed to happen.

I am now a bit stuck, as he is generating lots of sales every day which are actually normal Google search result, not from his site.

Disabling him on the other hand is not fair, at the end he is still a valid affiliate also doing sales through his site.

Did that happen to any of you? I guess if I would be a cold corporation, I would just disable his account.

[skibum]

Just the risk you take when aff URLs are the same domain as the site. If they can build up enough incoming links they can displace the official site in the SERPs.

[jcoronella]

Stream a page with the meta tag for when there is a query string. :
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow">

Sending a 301 would also probably work (from index.htm?affiliate=12345 to index.htm)

Both should still give him credit for referrals, but will pull the querystring version out of the SERPs. Be certain that you ranked for those terms previously, otherwise you will just lose what rankings he/she gave you.

The affiliate is not at fault here IMHO.

Another thread on the subject:
[webmasterworld.com...]

[tolachi]

I use mod rewrite to 301 redirect all that junk and the affiliate backlinks have disapeared from the serps.