How to set up affiliate/refferrer program that wil contribute to PR?

Determine the best way to build up program that will contribute to our PR

[ikke1]

How to set up affiliate/referrer program that wil contribute to PR?

Setting up an affiliate or refferer program is a good way to receive more visitors, but often the inbound links refer to pages with the affiliate ID in it.
Therefor our main url does not profit from these inbound links.

Is there a way of setting up such a program in such a way that our general PR will benefit? (maybe through usage of cookies).

Look forward to your comments.

Maarten

[steveb]

My experience is you will benefit regardless of how the links are set up, although you may do better one way than another.

One site I link to via a cgi redirect shows all my backlinks at www.theirsite.com when I link to www.theirsite.com/index.html?1000

[jamesyap]

track referral URL instead of using trackig ID, so they link directly to your site. Just how you are going to convince them how reliable it will be.

[cyberax]

I did a sample with quite a large amount of traffic (60,000 click thrus), and from this it showed that the HTTP_REFERRER was passed from their browsers to my script about 87% of the time.

[figment88]

I haven't done this, so it's just a supposition, but how about you give each affilaite their own sub-directory:

e.g.

www.yoursite.com/affiliate1/
www.yoursite.com/affiliate1/

Than in the default page use a noscript tag to add a link to the homepage:

e.g.
[noscript]This page requires JavaScript to be enabled. Please go to our homepage for <a href=www.yoursite.com>keyword</a>

[jamesyap]

having another subdirectory will only gives pr to that subdirectory, not your root page.

No idea on the javascript ...

cyberax, I bet those 13% are either
1. old broswers
2. they have manually block it
3. block by firewall
4. they type in the URL

So 87% = Grade A :)

[ikke1]

Thanks all for your input,

As the affiliate system needs to functions reliable and effective I think that steveb's idea is the most appropiate.

As I am not familiair with cgi-bin we need to look into this option. Any specific do's or do not's regarding setting up a reffering system using cgi-bin?

Thanx.

[Phil_S]

The program we use will use links like this.

<a href="http://www.our-website.com/cgi-our-website/affiliates/clickthru.cgi?id=Net&amp;page=http://www.our-website.com/Met_Rx_Met_Rx.html">Met RX</a>

Notice the keyword and full url is in the link and I know for a fact Google follows these links.

We're having trouble with our url in google, BUT all the incoming affiliate links that point to product pages are keeping the pages in Google and these pages also do well in the search engines.

Our pages that do not have these incoming affiliate links won't stay in Google.

[mayor]

Setting up an affiliate program with the intent of boosting your page rank is becoming history. The power affiliates you really want are far too smart for this.

Smart merchants will build their site to close sales and let the search engine traffic fall where it will. They'll let their affiliates work at pulling in traffic and pre-qualifying and pre-selling them.

Set up an affiliate program to build page rank and compete with your affiliates and you'll just draw links from the flunkies.

[Phil_S]

I agree.
That's not why we are using an affiliate program.

We did not make the one we use, I just happened to notice what was happening.