Affiliate links with tracking script

Do search engines ignore these?

[bpglady]

When my search engine position dropped on Google during their recent/ongoing re-indexing, I started doing some link checking. First, I found that my quite old and quite alive links from dmoz and Yahoo directory fell off Google's list. Second, when I search www.myurl[link]on Google, MSN and Yahoo, I see lots of shopping sites have linked to me but not a single one of my hard won affiliate links show up. Several of these are PR5's, they all go back about 12 months, each is listed with a link on my Links page so the spiders can find them (as are the Yahoo and dmoz links), and they all link to me with a tracking script in the following format: myurl.com/cgi-bin/XXX.cgi?adminid=A&id=B&pid=C.

Is there some problem with this link format or perhaps with the affiliate tracking software (the XXX above) that I use that's keping these very valuable links from being found and counted in my ranking?

[edited by: martinibuster at 7:15 pm (utc) on Oct. 3, 2004]
[edit reason] unlinked url [/edit]

[growingdigital]

First anything you read in Google about sites linking back to you is not accurate. They have not updated that feature for a few months. Secondly, I have heard that Google will sometimes penalize a site with too many affiliate links, and not enough unique content. I have observed this with many of my affiliate sites.

[martinibuster]

>>>Is there some problem with this link format...

Yeah, it won't count as a backlink and rightly so. They aren't linking to your site because it's an authority, they are linking to it for business purposes. There's no link popularity involved.

I have heard that Google will sometimes penalize a site with too many affiliate links...

Nah. You can hear all kinds of unfounded speculation on the web, but take a moment to think about it before accepting it as truth.

• If your website is pretty much nothing but affiliate links, expect no loving.
  
• If your website is using non-original content provided by the affiliate sites, forget about it.

Simply having affiliate links, even a lot of them, is not enough to sink you from Google. To assert otherwise is to turn a blind eye on all the aff sites ranking in the top five for pretty much anything you search on. Which renders absurd any assertion that aff links are causing penalties.

If anything, it's just a lame webmaster excuse.

[bpglady]

At the risk of being dense, let me state that (1) I'm talking about 7 affiliate links back to my site, and (2) my site is 100% origianl content, and so are most of the 7 sites linking to me that I'm talking about here. They are not "affiliate" sites, and neither am I. Do your comments still apply? And thanks for the help.

[deejay]

I have heard that Google will sometimes penalize a site with too many affiliate links, and not enough unique content. I have observed this with many of my affiliate sites.

Growingdigital, I think you are talking about the other side of the coin - sites belonging to affiliates that largely duplicate the content of the merchant site, eg, datafeed-based sites.

In which case, bgplady, as I take it you are a merchant, no, this particular point does not apply to you.

[chrisnrae]

" I see lots of shopping sites have linked to me but not a single one of my hard won affiliate links show up"

I'm confused by this comment. How are they "hard won" links? Affiliates sign up with you to make money by sending you traffic. You get traffic/increased sales from affiliates - that is what you "get" out of having them.

Affiliates are not there to link to you and give your site backlinks so that you can rank higher in the SERPs. Affiliates don't provide "hard won" backlinks - link development does.