Affiliates, links, duplicate content...

[sugarkane]

I'm working on an affiliate program for one of my sites, and was considering using links in the format domain.com/affiliate_id/page.html to boost link pop, using mod_rewrite to pass the aff_id to a session handling script.

What I can't decide is whether the benefits of incoming links will outweigh the dangers of having all these links point to basically duplicate content.

Any thoughts?

[agerhart]

SugarKane,

This is an interesting question.

We have discussed before that it is always good practice to have the links pointing to content that is on topic to the link text, right?

Well, following this it would seem that you may be jeopardizing the weight of the links.....in my opinion.

Any other opinions out there? [come on Paynt!]

[sugarkane]

> on topic

No problem with that, the affiliates would be linking to product pages and their pages would be on topic (hopefully ;)

What I'm worried about is having urls like domain.com/123/widget.html and domain.com/456/widget.html with the same content.

I wonder: if I banned the pages with robots.txt, would the incoming links still count?

[agerhart]

I see it from two different sides:

1) Why wouldn't they? If the spider follows the link from the other site, and simply is told not to spider your page, it is still a link.....

2) But, some spiders may see this as a dead link, or something along these lines, as they can't get to the destination page........am I wrong on this?

[ggrot]

As an alternative, what if you have your affiliates put a invis image on their pages from your site with sets a cookie for their visitor. Then they simply link to www.yoursite.com and they get credit for all purchases. The same could be done with an external j/s or css file too if you fear users have images turned off. Or heck, just have your affiliates enter their referring domains into a database and use the referring url to track hits. I can see problems with all of these, but a combo would be just as foolproof as links with the aff code in them.

[Drastic]

>if I banned the pages with robots.txt, would the incoming links still count?

I think this is the real question here. I don't think you don't want all aff pages open to spiders - dupe content, banning, and possibility of your affiliates getting the SEO rankings. (I've seen the latter several times)

Would the site still benefit as a whole from the link pop, even to denied pages? If so, I would go with your setup and deny in robots.txt.

ggrot has some excellent ideas, that would surely work. However, I think you would have trouble finding affiliates that would trust them - not something you want for a new program.