Best way to clean up affiliate links to help out Google?

What's the best way to tell Google these links point to the same page?

[trebor]

One of my sites has a lot of incoming links from various sites, all flagged in the url to tell me who's sending me the traffic. So the urls look like (made up example, of course):

www.myincrediblywonderfulsite.com/greatpage.html?AFFID=tom
www.myincrediblywonderfulsite.com/greatpage.html?AFFID=dick
www.myincrediblywonderfulsite.com/greatpage.html?AFFID=harry

The problem is that when I check google to see what it's listing, I'll often see a dozen copies of the same page, the only difference being the AFFID.

What's the best way to let Google know that these are really the same page?

My current thinking is:

1) store the AFFID in my database, associated with IP address.

2) redirect to the real page (ie: www.myincrediblywonderfulsite.com/greatpage.html)

3) hook back up with the AFFID as needed (chances of two people cruising in from different affiliates on the same IP in the small time window = slim).

My questions are: (1) is this at all a good idea, and if so, (2) what's the best way to do step 2, temp or permanent redirect?

[sdani]

Can't you just check the refferer to find from which site someone is coming from?

[ams_david]

Referrers are not always reliable. We sometimes get over 25% of users not sending referrer strings.

[trebor]

Not to mention, sometimes people will want to use the same affiliate ID with multiple pages/sites.

[Nikke]

I'm not sure you will be "helping Google", but you might get rid of the duplicate entries by doing it like many other affiliate programs.

1 - Send the link to one page that stores the AFFID value
2 - Redirect the user to your main page
3 - Let the main page store the AFFID value in a cookie on the visitors computer
4 - Track the cookie value for each click on your site instead of using it within the URLs

[trebor]

This is effectively what I'm doing, though I'm not using a cookie.

The real question is, do all the slightly different incoming links hurt your Google rankings (I got mercilessly and unfairly savaged by the great algorithm update)

R

[dannyboy]

Perhaps you could include the term "affiliate" somewhere in your link "hoping" that a smart spider might think, "well, it does mention 'affiliate' in the link, so I won't give this site a hard time about it."

Perhaps you can have your affiliates link to a directory which your robots.txt file prohibits spiders from visiting, such as:

[widgets.com...]

# robots.txt file contents:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /affiliates/

You may want to consider using a combination of mod_rewrite:

[widgets.com...]

This way, if you ever decide to give your affiliates replicated websites, you could transition seamlessly. That's what I'm considering in order to future-proof the site and affiliate links.

[Chelsea]

This is a fairly recent Google bug (6+ months?) - and rather than get into a panic about it individually, it would be better if Google finally sorted it out.

There have been many posts about this issue on these pages. Google must be aware of this issue by now.

Regards

[UK_Web_Guy]

I have seen sites running .asp pages for this purpose.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think G indexes these.