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Does google treat affiliate diferent affiliate tracking links as seperate pages? They are all going to the exact same page but have different referral strings.
Am I correct in saying the having hundreds of affiliate linking to our homepage (each using a different referral link) is NOT helping our home page PR? Ex.mysite.com/default.asp?affil=849 is viewed by Google as a DIFFERENT entire page than mysite.com...
Thank You
Am I correct in saying the having hundreds of affiliate linking to our homepage (each using a different referral link) is NOT helping our home page PR?
Even if Google separates between these pages, your site (your home page as well as the rest of your site) will benefit from these links (as long as your home page has links to other internal pages). The reason is that PR is passed from the 'different home pages' to the linked pages and back to you real home page. Of course, if Googles separates between these pages, a little bit of PR is wasted. However, most of PR is transferred to your site. (But the major problem might be that the anchor text of incoming links is separated between these pages.)
The Toolbar doesn't check the PageRank for URLs with the "?" in, so the Toolbar PR5 is only the PageRank for the domain root minus one (as there's one "/").
You can check to see if the pages are in Google by using the cache. If there's no cache then that URL isn't in Google. If there's a cache, and it has the URL at the top, then it's real PR unless the URL has a '?' in which case there is PR but you can't see how much. If there's a cache but it has another URL at the top, then the URL you're checking was merged in Google's databases into the URL shown in the cache.
I haven't tried Toolbar v2 yet, so it may be different.
<?php
if (isset($ref)) {
setcookie ("ref", $ref, time()+5184000, "", "mydomain.com", 0);
};
header('HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently');
header("Location: [mydomain.com...]
?>
And then make affiliate links look like this:
[mydomain.com...]
Will this pass all PR to my main page?
Is it Google safe?
Currently DeepFreshBot seems to ignore targets of permanent redirects.
I would use UA cloaking and put in a NOINDEX,FOLLOW robots tag for bots, stripping the tracking code from links on the page served to spiders. Ensure you have links to yourdomain.com/ on the page. This helps to avoid tons of duplicate listings (URLs with query strings are unique) and should pass some PR to your main index page. I'm not sure Google will like this solution, but the method is very similar to permitted cloaking (hiding session IDs from bots).
... a NOINDEX,FOLLOW robots tag ... should pass some PR to your main index page
I don't think that PR is passed in this case, because a page that isn't in the index will probably get no PR. Can someone confirm this?
As for pages with NOINDEX robots tag: Googlebot fetches them frequently, indexes the links (NOINDEX,FOLLOW or just NOINDEX) and passes PR, but does not cache them. That's from my experience, and to the best of my knowledge not confirmed.
have you ruled out that the PR value (for 'noindex' or 'disallow' pages) is an estimate from the Toolbar?
Currently DeepFreshBot seems to ignore targets of permanent redirects.
Affiliate links will be pointing to my page from other pages(which I dont have control over) so cloaking is out of question.
Do a site search for 301 redirects.
[webmasterworld.com...]
[webmasterworld.com...]
...
> cloaking is out of question.
True, in general. The UA cloaking I've suggested above would change the content your server delivers to bots when an URL with query string is requested. That may be borderline stuff (there is no guarantee you'll go away with it), but it is pretty much under your control.
