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When I sell the advertising, I like to track how many times the ad gets clicked. The best way to do this is to set up a dummy [i.e. nonexistent] page with a .htaccess redirect to the advertiser's website. I can then check my logs for this dummy page, and the number of times it was requested becomes the number of clicks the advertiser got.
I'm running into a problem with an affiliate program I use. For whatever reason, Google has decided to index my "dummy" page as the page for the advertiser, so that when someone searches Google, my page comes up with the advertiser's description. Since this is an affiliate program, my affiliate link comes up too.
I understand that this is due to Google trying to remove duplicate pages from its index.
I don't want to abandon my tracking method, because I have a generic ad, and like to track the number of clicks that this space is capable of in any given month (so I can possibly sell it to an advertiser for a fixed rate instead of affiliate program) but I realize that this is probably unfair to the merchant because he's paying commissions on traffic coming from Google.
However, I also wonder if my site's high pagerank gives a boost to his site, making this more of a win-win situation than a pure lose situation for the merchant. (he gets ranked #1 for the search; perhaps without the affiliation with my site he would be ranked a lot lower). The affiliate has complained that his site used to have the same rank without the affiliate link in the past, but I wonder if Google is taking the best possible pagerank, but then also taking the URL at random, sometimes taking the one with the affiliate link, sometimes taking the one without.
I have tried creating a second dummy link, so the link indexed by google doesn't have the affiliate code, but the one on my site does, but it seems that within a couple of weeks, Google drops the old non-affiliate link and puts the new one (with the affiliate code) in. So I'm back where I started.
There's no way I can tell Google to not index a link, so I have no way of stopping Google here. I'm not trying to take advantage of this merchant, but I don't want to stop counting my clicks just because Google has some quirk in it.
Does anyone have any thoughts?
Ralph Slate
When I sell the advertising, I like to track how many times the ad gets clicked. The best way to do this is to set up a dummy [i.e. nonexistent] page with a .htaccess redirect to the advertiser's website. I can then check my logs for this dummy page, and the number of times it was requested becomes the number of clicks the advertiser got.
Hi,
I've tried doing something similar. I have a folder of dummy pages with a meta refresh to the page in question. The folder is disallowed in my robots.txt file but Google still insists on indexing the links on the page containing them even though the place that they point to is disallowed.
I would like to have a better suggestion if anyone has one. I would do a cgi to redirect using a hash of codes twinned with actual URLs but I'm not confident that google wouldn't index these.
I currently have a significant problem which is in effect the reverse of this.
If I search for inurl:domain I see a link listed like this [<SE>.co.uk...]
Someone kindly suggested a way to get rid of these some time ago and I inserted a rewrite rule into my .htaccess file, but it is still there. Most annoying is the fact that if I search for the term which my site was dropped for in Florida this plain link with just "similar pages" under it ranks about 15 places above the page that it redirects to. I really need to get rid of this as when I click on similars I see search engines. So I guess that this might be diluting my theme.
Best wishes
Sid
