Flattening Tracking URLs

Gosh if only tracking URLs counted...

[micahb37]

I run a fairly large site, which has thousands and thousands of backlinks out there. The problem is the majority of them are tracking URLs (gotta pay the folks that are nice enough to drive traffic, right?).

Does anyone know of a way to continue tracking incoming traffic, but flatten out the link so that spiders see them as legit backlinks?

For example, we now have tracking URLs that look like:

www.widget.com/servlet/RedirectServlet?m=google&p=home&entry=24

If I make it www.widget.com/google/home/24, I lose the ability to track, right?

micah

[olwen]

I found some good stuff at [phpbuilder.net...] on making a dynamic site with apacehe that doesn't look as if it is dynamic. You could see if you could adapt that. I found it quite easy to follow, and am making good use of it.

[CraigE]

Hi micahb37:

If you get a lead on this, please let me know.

The best example of affiliate links showing up in Google is <snip>.com. Check it out. I'm not sure what affilliate software they use or if they built their own, but it's obviously working - PR7 and over 900 backwards links!

Again, please keep me in the loop.

Best regards,
CraigE

[edited by: Woz at 6:40 am (utc) on Mar. 24, 2003]
[edit reason] no sigs please [/edit]

[Trodda]

Got the exact same problem. We track all our campaigns from affiliates through to press releases using unique tracking URLs and a redirect. If anyone could shed any light on this topic it would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks
Trodda

[Ceverett]

What about using the CGI HTTP_REFERER variable, which contains
the URL of the page where the link was, to track the incoming
link?

Seems like then you could pass a user id cookie along with the
301 redirect, and connect the affiliate with the user id
cookie in a database.

Then you could have a link to something like
www.foo.com/inbound/

[Trodda]

Not all that technically gifted, Ceverett. Can you explain a little better. My affiliate URLs currently look like this;

[widgets.com...]

What do I need to change, and what will the changed URL look like?