Affiliate Links & Pagerank

[Auradefect]

I'm just curious if incomming affiliate links raise the pagerank of a site? I'm sure this has been discussed in the past, but i know google is always getting more powerful day by day and i'm looking for the latest information. I'm sure it makes a difference the way the link is setup, but lets just assume this is a standard affiliate link.

[olderscot]

The bottom line is that all links to a page will increase the pagerank of that page (and thereby the PR of other pages that are linked to, i.e. the 'site') with a few exceptions.

1. Links from FFA pages or other pages with PR=0
2. Links with 3 or more variables.
3. Links with "ID=" as one of the variables (I believe).
4. Links to duplicate pages that get may filtered.

4 is the killer for affiliate links. If Google matches the page linked to by the affiliate with one that already exists in the index then there's a good chance that the page will be filtered out as a duplicate page and the pagerank won't get counted.

If you think about it, Google has no option really. Otherwise you could just create thousands of internal links to your home page of the form "www.widgets.com/index.php?var1=a&var2=b" and expect google to treat them all as separate pages and give you a huge PR boost. Believe me, this wouldn't work if you tried it.

If I was you I wouldn't worry about the PR of affiliate links. Use affiliates as a way to bring more customers to your site and if you do get a PR boost count yourself lucky.

Mike

[Wired Suzanne]

4 is the killer for affiliate links.

And so is 3. The user tracker code is seen by Google as a new page. mydomain.com/mysite.htm?usertracker will receive the PR. Not mydomain.com/mysite.htm

And third party affiliate programs. All affiliates linking to myaffiliate.com are not helping mydomain.com at all.

[killroy]

I can just urge everybody who runs an affiliate system to set your cookie then 301 redirect.

So a link to
www.domain.com/product.html?aff=xyz
sets a cookie then 301s to
www.domain.com/product.html

I think that's the best you can do.

SN

[golloween]

Killroy, thanks for a good advice! I'm wondering why do you recommend the 301 -- wouldn't the 302 be better?

[theleveller]

I've been running my affiliate now for several months and was wondering why my PR hasnt changed even though ive had a ruck of inbound links.

After reading the advice above, i've now got my referal links to 301 and am hopefully looking for a change in a few months.

Thanks for the heads up on the 301 redirect...

[killroy]

I've just noticed a few affiliates I use do that. Usually the affilaite service is on a different machine then the target website. You link to the affiliate service and it redirects to the target page.

Regarding 301 VS 302, you'll have to decide, I don't recommend one over the other as I haven't studied that situation closely yet.

SN

[ectect]

Hi Killroy

I can just urge everybody who runs an affiliate system to set your cookie then 301 redirect.

If you've got a moment could you expand on that - is there any problems you know of with search engines and redirects?

Cheers

[woop01]

Why should you get page rank from your affiliates? You aren't paying them for links, you are paying them for sales. If you want PR from your affiliates, start paying them for the PR that comes from the links.

Paying them for sales when what you're really after is PR is a pretty unethical practice.

[dirkz]

3. Links with "ID=" as one of the variables (I believe).
4. Links to duplicate pages that get may filtered.

Strange. Last week I I realized that by coincidence I had raised the PR of my affiliate page (external to my site, the link containing "?id=string") to a PR3 just by placing banners. Never intended to do this :)

Giving your affiliate page decent PR with some good anchor text from your content pages might be a good strategy in some cases.