Affiliate software that passes PR?

http://www.your_site.com/<username> - A no-no?

[RoadRash]

I know, PR is not important... *grin*

I am trying to figure out what affiliate software to use, hosted, or in-house. If i go inhouse, will google pass PR to my site? Affiliate links will look like:

[your_site.com...]
[your_site.com...]
[your_site.com...] - or -
[your_site.com...]

Will these pass PR? If o use the 3rd option (/g.o/<un>), can i block the directory via robots.txt, but still have the PR leak?

[WebGuerrilla]

Your second and or third option would be the best, but it probablly won't have the type of effect you think it will.

First off, if you rewrite the url to look like

yourdomain.com/username

then in the eyes of a bot, each affiliate would be linking to a unique page. The inbound PR from all your affiliates would not be credited to your home page.

The second problem has to do with duplicate content. If Google collects 2000 links from your affiliates, it will request 2000 unique urls that all deliver the same exact page. The end result is all the affiliate links get dumped and your homepage is left, which puts you right back where you started.

[deejay]

And your third problem is that your affiliates will wonder what your motivation for having the programme is.

[Jenstar]

And you also have to consider *where* all those affiliates will be placing those links too. It might be against the agreement to spam or submit to linkfarms, but I would be willing to bet at least a few do.