Parameters in URLs

Does this still count as a link to the landing page?

[Murdoch]

In our company we have a multitude of affiliates who link to us. However, the link to us must include an additional parameter of?aff=example in order to give them commissionable credit to any who enter and use our services. The question is, do the search engines count this link towards the landing page in question or do they count it as a completely unique URL due to the addtional parameters. I really need to know this before I decide the direction of my linking strategy.

[whoisgregg]

I am also quite curious to hear input on this issue. From other experiences, I'd say that the engines will consider each variation as a separate page, but those experiences are with internal linking.

If the search engines count a /somepage.html?ref=affiID link as a separate page from /somepage.html, would immediately doing a 301 redirect to the same page without the parameters (after setting the referrer string to a cookie for tracking purposes), cause the engines to justly count those links to the real page?

[martinibuster]

Do a search for?ref=affiID, I think you may find your answer there.

[Murdoch]

From what I've encountered lately, if I do the linkdomain:www.example.com it will give me links for pages within my homepage, including those with?aff=values in them. However, when I do this with Google (and I know Google has massive filters) I only get the pages with the exact URL configuration. I guess my real question is: Does Google still count these links...and yes I would like to know the answer to that 301 redirect possibility...

[whoisgregg]

Google still does in my case... I just changed over the receiving page to store the values in a session then send a 301 redirect to the same page. I'll let you know if that cleans those extra parameter URLs. I suspect it will. ;)