Affiliate links

the usefulness of inbound links with affiliate identifiers

[bradley phil]

Morning/afternoon/evening all. My site uses an affiliate scheme where we give a small reward to the member of our forums who can get his/her link to our site clicked hte most. The logic behind this scheme is to get us traffic, and also to get us inbound links. The format of the links is www.thesite.com/affiliateid?9 or something similar; where 9 is the member ID of this particular member. All these links go straight to the index page of our site; is this a good linking strategy? Will these count as backlinks to my site, or will each link count as a new page on my site? Would that be a problem?

Big thanks in advance for your views and comments

[Murdoch]

This is actually a question I've asked on several occasions that I haven't gotten a real solid answer to. I do know a couple of things though:

1. Yahoo will list these links if you do linkdomain:www.mydomain.com so it goes without saying that Yahoo will already count these.

2. If you don't have too many of these already, redirecting them with a 301 can never hurt (provided the values are saved in a cookie)

The question I really want answered is whether or not Google still counts these links towards the page or if they consider them unique? Of course, using the Google link: query is useless in figuring this out...so good luck and if you find out please post it.

[Jon_King]

Can you find any link urls that G 'counts' with a variable?