Forum Moderators: phranque
My basic question, explained further below, is:
Will using the SantaFe AFFILIATE MODULE jeapordize our search engine
rankings? (I explain below how it works)
I'm attempting to simplify management of our wholesale and retail sites by having them within one Miva store.
How? By using SantaFe Mall's Affiliate module to display a different look and feel for each of domains, one existing site which is retail, one new which will be wholesale. Our store is uncompiled 4.12.
I don't want my dealers to feel we are competing with them.
Problem is the module can only display ONE url - so due to above I must make it the dealer url. (Don't want the retail url to display to dealer referred customers).
Now my question!: If I change my retail site to become part of my wholesale store (per this module) - which means our retail url which we've been using for 5 years - will now bring them to the retail look and feel with our retail name displayed in our header BUT will display the DEALER URL.
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This module would do nothing more than display whatever look and feel we have created within our store - BASED on the url the viewer uses.
This modules main purpose was for affiliates of a site to carry forward their own look and feel when sending someone to an affiliate's site.
BUT the url shown can only be the one registered within the store. Since we don't want our dealers or dealer's customers to see the retail url, we must select the dealer url as the master one - meaning it will be the url shown to all viewers on all DYNAMIC pages. We can still, of course, display our static pages with our retail url.
Do the engines look at BOTH the links to url's on a static page as well as the url that is displayed on the "linked to" page itself?
When using this affiliate module, when a search engine spiders our retail static pages, the links they will see on the static pages ARE for our retail url, however, when the spider looks at the url on the subsequent page that is displayed, it is the final url that the module is displaying, so it will be the dealer url displaying the retail look and feel! We could have our header (as we do now) link to our retail url so that even the dealer url which is displaying the dynamic retail look and feel would have at least one link back to our retail url.
Based on this - would we likely keep or lose our current search engine listings and/or rankings based on the rules that the major search engines use?
Do you know how this will affect search engine results? I presume when engines spider our site, they won't see our retail url, except for our index and any static pages, which WILL have the LINK to our RETAIL URL but not Miva's dynamic pages.
The way the module works is when it sees a customer come in with the retail url, it will then display the retail look and feel, but the domain url will change to the dealer url.
Here is how this MIVA module works direct from the developer: "The software does not create or use any Frames.
It allows you to call different html dynamically to create a different look based upon the URL that the customer comes from when they access the store."
I'm hoping someone with strong knowledge of how search engines will react to this setup you'll know the answer!
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Thank you.
Bob Bokor
[edited by: pageoneresults at 8:14 pm (utc) on Nov. 9, 2004]
[edit reason] Removed Signature URI - Please Refer to TOS [/edit]
