Incoming Links: Does site.com differ from site.com/?1234

[kisk]

Hey, I'm working on setting up a 10-tier affiliate program for my site but I had a question about the links my affiliates would use.

The way I was hoping to set it up was to have the affiliates add '?THEIR_ID' to the end of whatever URL of our site. ex. http://www.site.com/?1234 or http://www.site.com/?myaffiliateid

My question is:
When all these affiliates setup these links, will google pick them up as links directly to www.site.com or will they consider the "/?xxxxx" part of a different URL/separate pagerank page?

If the latter, I was thinking about setting up a 301 permanant redirect for any URLS like "www.site.com/?xxxxx", that would redirect straight to www.site.com ... if I did this then, if not in the first case, would google count this as a valid incoming link to www.site.com ?

Any help would be great!

Thanks! :)

[kisk]

bump :)

[eitemiller]

page.html and page.html?whatever are two sperate pages - G sees them as two different pages.

[oagady]

Since page.html and page.html?whatever have the same content, are they penalized for having duplicate content?

[kisk]

Originally Posted by eitemiller

page.html and page.html?whatever are two sperate pages - G sees them as two different pages.

That's what I thought. Because of this, I was going to setup a 301 permanent redirect for any pages with "?whatever" that would forward to the main page (in this example, page.html). Would this tell google that the link that came in at the "?whatever" should have been counted for the base page and give the base page the vote?

[pdstein]

Great post! This is an important question for anyone who has affiliate programs or partnerships. Obviously, if there are ways to set-up affiliate tracking that also would make those links contribute towards improving search engine rank, that would be huge. I look forward to reading additional comments on this topic.

[mccreath]

I spotted the same problem with one of my sites. The search engines had indexed links that would trigger the affiliate program so affiliates were getting commission when they were nothing to do with the referral.

My quick solution was to detect a url contained an affiliate ID and then mark the page as "noindex".

I have two possible plans:

1. The same idea as kisks, where I will detect the affiliate code, register it, then do a 301 redirect to the same url with the affiliate code stripped out.

2. Decide affiliates based on the original referring url. Instead of using an affiliate code I would register specific external urls as related to an affiliate. If I spot that URL as the referrer I will register the affiliate. This removes the need for any query string content and means the affiliate does not have to do anthing special in there referral urls.

[ppayne]

Yes, I've been planning on launching an affiliate program for my site, J-List, although I plan to brand it as something else (it's so pedestrian to use "affiliate program"). I've assumed/hoped that having, say, 100 affiliates linking to my products would count as 100 good links which might help me in the Google wars. Is this not automatically the case?

[pdstein]

Originally Posted by mccreath

2. Decide affiliates based on the original referring url. Instead of using an affiliate code I would register specific external urls as related to an affiliate. If I spot that URL as the referrer I will register the affiliate. This removes the need for any query string content and means the affiliate does not have to do anthing special in there referral urls.

I've thought about this as well. I was trying to think of what some of the downsides to doing it this way would be...

1) It would have to allow affiliates to enter multiple URLs for those affilates with multiple sites. (not a big deal)

2) Don't some privacy protection software or browsers disable the sending of information like referal URL?

3) Some prospective affiliates might be hesitant to sign-up out of concern that this is a less reliable tracking method and they won't be credited with all their referals.

Thoughts?

[pdstein]

bump ^