Affiliate Links Ignored by Google for Link Popularity?

Wondering if I need to change my affiliate link format

[DavidWood99]

Hi guys,

my first official post here - hi!

I give my affiliates links in the form:

www.mysite.com/cmd.asp?a=****xxx&p=download.htm (for example)

I'm concerned Google may not count these links for link popularity, and wonder if I have to change the format?

What could I change the format to for Google, and how can I automate this?

Thanks very much,

David

[Robert Charlton]

Hi David - Welcome to the forums. I was looking into this a while back and came across the following threads:

Gaining link popularity from incoming affiliate links?
[webmasterworld.com...]

Message #4 suggests using HTTP REFERERS info along with an affiliate database and cookie based tracking, and is probably the most coherent answer I found to the question.

This thread, though, suggests that you should leave those links alone...

How to set up affiliate/referrer program that will contribute to PR?
[webmasterworld.com...]

Smart merchants will build their site to close sales and let the search engine traffic fall where it will. They'll let their affiliates work at pulling in traffic and pre-qualifying and pre-selling them.

Set up an affiliate program to build page rank and compete with your affiliates and you'll just draw links from the flunkies.

I'm on the SEO for clients end, so I'm for changing those links, but the above comment makes a lot of sense to me.

PS - Let me suggest that you use Google to do a site search before posting your questions. You'll be surprised what you can come up with.

[DavidWood99]

Thanks very much Robert - that is excellent. It's great to get such fast, expert advice - a great forum.

(And yes, good suggestion on searching first.)

I also have now a follow up question if that's OK(which I did search on a while back):

Suppose I do create a google friendly URL - the end result is the page will have to redirect to my shopping cart software, which sets the affiliate cookie (they control the module so no way around this that I know of), and the redirect back to my page.

Will Google still give me credit for the incoming links given there are two redirects happening? (even if I do flatten the URL to something like product1.htm)

Thanks,

David

[Robert Charlton]

David,

I'm not an expert on what you're asking, but... if I understand you correctly... search engine spiders can't execute a script to set a cookie, so GoogleBot is never going to follow the path you describe.

If you want Google to see your page, you've got to deliver to GoogleBot a version of the page with a plain vanilla url... preferably one without parameters, question marks, search engine unfriendly characters, and session IDs. Opinions may vary about how many parameters the engines can spider... but there's universal agreement that session IDs will kill you.

Delivering this kind of url generally requires a combination of rewriting your url and agent delivery... once known as cloaking. In this case, you'd probably pass any hand inspection, and I wouldn't worry about doing it. Essentially, you'd be sensing search engine bots and delivering to them version of your page without a session ID in the url.

I'm really not the person to go into how to do this... Before too long, I may be trying to find out how to do it myself. ;)

Give searching site:webmasterworld.com on Google a shot... it's a lot better than the site search feature built into the board... and check in Ecommerce forums and the various technology forums on the board.

[ogletree]

You could always cloak. Just make sure you understand all the possible ramifacations of it. I don't think there would be any for that kind of cloaking.

[shady]

Hi David

(my apologies for using php as an example but I'm sure you can do the same in asp)

It is possible to track affiliates by using a specific format of URL rather than parameters.

For example, instead of using:
mydomain.com/showproduct.php?id=123&affiliate=456

you could use:
mycomain.com/affid_456/showproduct_123.php and convert that URL to
mydomain.com/showproduct.php?id=123&affiliate=456 on the server

Google will then follow this link and pass ranking to it. This page would obviously have a link to your homepage etc... to distribute this ranking.

Best regards
Shady

[franckey9]

In my country (Poland) there is very popular online book store. This book store has very smart affiliate program, which is 'google-firiendly'.

I'm a partner of this store. Recently, on one of my site I've added affiliate links. The format of links is the following:

[xyzxyz.pl...]

where **** is my unique ID number. Atter clicking, users are immediately redirected to:

[xyzxyz.pl...]

However, if I use link command on Google:
link:http://xyzxyz.pl/books/particularbook.htm

my site apears in results.
So it means, that book store has to have very smart system of redirection. Do you think, that 301 redirection is enuoght to be Google friendly?

Franckey / epokaY

[plumsauce]

In Franckey's specific case, according to a network trace:

landing page does a *301* to a cgi-bin with parameters which in turn does a *302* to the final page.

and he mentions that he is still listed as a backlink to the final page.

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