Why are Clickbank hoplinks indexed by Google?

[jbsmith]

Came across something strange this past weekend in my web logs - I have an e-book listed on Clickbank, the main domain (mine) is indexed by Google, but under certain keyword phrases I noticed lots of traffic so I searched and found clickbank hoplinks indexed by Google from an affiliate who is promoting my product through Clickbank.

Checking, I found many other CB hoplinks indexed as well - is this normal?

Jeff

[tedster]

As far as I know, ClickBank hoplinks use a 301 redirect and so those urls "should not" be indexed. Are you seeing the hop link url in Google's regular search results, or just in the link: operator results?

[Marcia]

You can find hop links, and plenty of "error" pages on their secure server.

[Timetraveler]

Its not common but it definately happens with a few affiliate links. Usually it doesn't take long for them to disappear but I've seen some last 3-4 months. Yahoo was really bad about it but seems to have changed a couple months ago.

[Marcia]

Yahoo & MSN are both listing all the affiliate tracking links from two differnt networks now, they're replacing the pages they're on.

[skweb]

Yahoo actually indexes my amazon affiliate id links embedded links. Thanks Yahoo for all the extra money.

[WiseWebDude]

Oh yea, Google and the rest actually index Google's?gclid URLs as well giving you duplicate content issues...