"refer=someSite" reducing pagerank?

refer url affiliatePR pagerank

[nathank000]

Okeedokee- have read through as many search results as I can do without the boss asking me if i am actually doing something, so if this is posted, please redirect me and I will read from there...

I noticed that one of our sites has a url of www.oursite.com/?refer=Affiliate

we use this as a means of tracking but with this finding came some questions:

:::to google- is www.somesite.com the same url as www.somesite.com/?refer=Affiliate.

:::if not, will the PR of my site overall decrtease because our affiliates do not link to the same url?

:::any suggestions on our tracking scheme to avoid these problems if they exist?

Many thanks in advance,
-nathan

[pixel_juice]

Hi nathank000, welcome to webmasterworld :)

www.somesite.com/?refer=Affiliate.
www.somesite.com/?oo=aaa
www.somesite.com/?anythingyoulike

all deliver the exact same page to Google which is the easiest possible thing for them to filter. The 'authoritative' page (i.e. the one that is linked to most often or from the most important pages) will be the only one listed. They will all have the same PR. If they don't already (which is fairly unlikely), then they will do eventually.

If you are talking about your own site and a link from an affiliate being listed instead of you, then potentially, one of your affiliates has done a much better of promoting your services on the search engines than you have, and you will need to get good incoming links to resolve the situation. There are some existing posts about this you might find with a site search (at the top of the page).

>>:::any suggestions on our tracking scheme to avoid these problems if they exist?

You could potentially use some kind of redirect to prevent Google indexing the urls, or add some kind of clever line to a robots.txt file.