CNAME and google ranking.

[doogie88]

Hello, say I have a site. www.example.com.
It's to be used as an store, private label, so my name and links are there.

This is how it works
I have to create a cname in my control panel for the affiliate.
So my affiliate link would be www.affiliate-example.com/index.jsp?cid=123
So when I add a CNAME it would just look like

www.example.com/index.jsp?cid=123

And it would really be pointing to the affiliate link.

Now, how would google see that? Would it affect rankings? Like would google just see it as the affiliate site, and not my own content?

Two, how do I properly link to www.affiliate-example.com/index.jsp?cid=123
so when you go to www.example.com it redirects to www.example.com/index.jsp?cid=123 which is really the affiliate link? A 301 redirect on say index.html?

This was in their notes, which had me worried and a bit confused:

A CNAME is not a subdomain, and should never be used as a standalone URL on your site. URL masking is not a search engine optimization technique


And lastly, how does google feel about me building links to my main domain, which is redirecting anyways, can I get any ranking by doing this?
Or would it be okay if I had www.example.com/separatepage.html and tried to link build that page?

Hope that wasn't too confusing, because I am!
Hope someone can help. Thanks.

[edited by: tedster at 6:13 am (utc) on Feb 19, 2010]
[edit reason] switch to example.com - it cannot be owned [/edit]

[anallawalla]

I don't know why they brought up a subdomain, as it isn't relevant.

When I last did this, I had to point the A record at the IP address of the merchant site and the CNAME being the URL given to me. Some hosting providers give you a nice interface to do this, e.g. cPanel.

You won't be able to do any significant SEO with this, since your domain is really an alias for the real site. If you can build a keyword-rich micro site and add a frame pointing to the merchant page, you might have more luck.

[doogie88]

Thanks for the reply.
I can edit the headers so I can create my own lins and pages. So I was thinking of link building to those pages. Would that work?

My main concern is, I purchased a pretty good keyword rich name (off a company) so I don't want it to go to waste.

So if using this domain for this program is hurting me, then I wonder if I should just get a generic name for the program, and use the good domain to build organic traffic.

[edited by: tedster at 12:03 am (utc) on Feb 20, 2010]
[edit reason] sorry, no links to examples [/edit]

[tedster]

If you have one domain that only 301 redirects to another, and you continue to promote the redirecting domain rather than the final destination, Google may well see that as an attempt at manipulating the rankings and hand you a penalty.