How to handle incoming affiliate links?

How to set them up to be nice to both Google and Us...

[trebor]

Many sites (mine included), tag their incoming links so we can track them, and in some cases reward the person who sent us the traffic (aka an affiliate program).

So the url will look something like this:

[wonderfulsite.com...]

In my case, one of my sites has a bunch of listings in google for the same page, all with different affiliate endings.

Obviously, it would be good for me (PR) and good for google (less duplicate pages), if these could all get consolidated.

Is there a "Google-approved" way of doing this? For example, having the incoming affiliate link redirect to the actual page + set a cookie?

Best,R

[DaveN]

we use the http-referer in a Nt Enviroment

so if site_a passes traffic we capture the url and set has a session var so if that customer purchases anything it's added to the affiliate database we also drop a cookie (30 day set to that affiliate)

The other rule we have added is that if site_b refer's a customer we overwrites the cookie only on that visit and add a start date + 30 for the new affiliate so that sitea keeps the customer for the full 30 day but not for that transaction.

DaveN

[trebor]

Dave,

If I were doing it all over again, I'd do it that way, but unfortunately, I (and many others) are left with a legacy of links in the form of

[whatever.com...]

Thus, the question is, if I perm redirect such links to

[whatever.com...]

is google going to follow the redirect and give the PR credit to the homepage. Or give up and throw away the PR.

As I said, the point is, how do we tell Google that

[whatever.com...]

and

[whatever.com...]

are really the same url.

Oh googleguy...