Gaining link popularity from incoming affiliate links?

[jason4656]

I wonder if a site has many links coming into an affliliate program say through a queery string from other affiliates could these be classed as incoming links, would they be spidered?. Does anyone have any ideas on how to make this work? for link popularity. Right now we have so many affiliates who indirectly link to us but dont get any credit as they go via an affiliate program. If you made the links to an affiliate program within the domain would it be any better but then what page if any would gain the incoming link? is it goiing to benefit the overall domain at all? The page that these people will link to I guess it isnt worth anything for that page to rank high so any ideas would help

thanks

[Grumpus]

There are several "shopping cart" programs available on the web that have built in affiliate programs. The one in particular that I'm thinking of "does" in fact improve PR for the pages it links to. Another fun thing (and you'd think that the SEO guys at the "big" companies would jump on this, but they don't) is to build a "links" page for all of your affiliates. This creates an increased pagerank for their site and after a couple months, it reverberates back.

G.

[ciml]

If people link to a separate address (eg. yoursite.com/affiliate.pl?id=123456) then you don't get the benefit unless URLs are spotted as duplicates to one of your pages and merged. If you have a high PageRank affiliate then their affiliate URL might be the one Google keeps, giving it the backlinks to your duplicate page as well.

If the affiliate also links to your 'normal' page directly then you should get the PageRank from that link.

[brendan]

What you need to do is to use HTTP REFERERS have your index page query the HTTP_REFERER of the visitor using PHP or your preferred server side scripting language.

Once you have this you need to compare it against your affiliates URL database. Ask your affiliates to add a URL to your database whenever they link to you from it. Then if someone visits your site via a link from one of your approved affiliates your web script will query the database and then generate a cookie on their machine depending on the referrer that links that user to the affiliate page they came from.

This way is more hassle for the affiliates than the standard way but if you write a user friendly system it will allow you to gain extra Google brownie points very well whilst at the same time pleasing your affiliates.

Instead of the standard link to a get URL way which puts the cookie on depending on the contents of the GET string.

This method will only work if the user passes a correct HTTP HEADER to your site telling it where it heard of you from but both ways are dependant on cookies anyway and most browsers nowadays will support both.

If anyone wants us to write them a system like this PM me :) It would probably take us about a day to implement.

Brendan