The best way to get affiliates to link to my site?

Does the URL matter?

[limitup]

I'm starting an in-house affiliate program for a new site, and I want to make sure that I use the best URL structure, if there is one. Obviously I will provide them with exact anchor text, but does the URL matter? i.e. whether it's a dynamic link like /foo.cgi?aff or a redirect like /foo/aff/ etc. Does it matter?

[growingdigital]

/foo/aff/ is cleaner and more readable. Perhaps less chances for mistakes when copying and pasting your links throughout their site.

[limitup]

Yeah, for sure. But do the search engines care, especially Google in terms of PR etc?

[pageoneresults]

Yeah, for sure. But do the search engines care, especially Google in terms of PR etc?

Let's keep this one generic in nature. URI paths have no bearing on PR (PageRank).

I think the best option would be /affiliate/. Give them a link from a first level sub-directory. You could also do /sub/affiliate/. That just puts them one level deeper and possibly one PR point lower depending on the linking structure of the site.

You want to try and keep your most important content as close to the /root as possible. Affiliates would be classified as important content. ;)

[limitup]

Cool, thanks for the info. Reason I asked is because I swore I read somewhere in an article about linking is that dynamic or certain other types of links don't pass PR, etc. and aren't as good as other types of links.