are links with ?affid=XXX registered by Google?

[dave487]

Hello,

We have a scheme offering commission to sites that link to us, the link format the sites must use is www.domain.com/index.php3?affid=XXX where XXX is their affilliate ID number.

I understand that this type of link will not be registered by google as linking to www.domain.com and will therefore not improve our rankings, searching for link:www.domain.com on google does not show up any of our affilliates who use the above link format.

Is there any way around this?

Thanks.

[digitalpoint]

Setup your script that registers the affiliate ID (and sets a cookie I presume) to do a 301 redirect to the root of the domain.

- Shawn

[schlottke]

I wish I knew how to do that... any clue on a step by step tutorial, or where to find one?

[digitalpoint]

How are you tracking them right now? With a cookie? Also, what type of server is it, and what programming languages are available to use on it (PHP maybe)?

- Shawn

[schlottke]

I run it through osCommerce.

http://www.jrwrestling.com/catalog/index.php?ref=5

is an example of a link. The currently only carry the PR passed down from their preceeding page..

[digitalpoint]

Well, since it's already PHP, it might be as simple as doing something like this after somewhere after the code that reads and does it's thing with the ref variable:


<?php // redirect to Hosting page
header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently");
header("Location: http://www.jrwrestling.com/catalog/");
?>


- Shawn

[eCommando]

On the 301 redirect can you execute other codes before redirecting?

[digitalpoint]

On the server you can, you can't send anything to the user's browser though.

- Shawn

[schlottke]

I tried using that code in the referal script. It does redirect back to the main page, the only problem is that the referal script is loaded again while browsing any of the catagories so you are constantly redirected back to the domain. Any tips?

[digitalpoint]

Browsing the categories should not be calling your affiliate script...

- Shawn

[schlottke]

The affiliate script is (Im almost certain) coded into an include that is called up all of the time. (application_affiliate_top.php) This is where the cookie is set and the only place (I think) that this code could be placed. Ill keep digging though.