Whenever I find a relevant site linking to mine I offer them to join my affiliate program. The problem is that if they do decide to join the affiliate program, their links change to point to the affiliate url instead of my domain. If I was to offer my most important affiliates a link to my domain such as www.mydomain.com/affiliateName and then place a .htaccess redirect on my end to the affiliate url instead, would that benefit me at all? Or in the eyes of google, do those links not even count since I'm redirecting them to a different domain immediately? Anyone have a good solution to this? I hate to lose the great links some of these sites have pointing to my site...
thanks for the replies, but my question is to whom this normal link weight gets passed... Not sure if I made it clear enough...so the domain affiliates are currently linking to is mydomain.affiliateprogramdomain.com So if site A links to www.mydomain.com/affiliatename and I in turn redirect it immediately to mydomain.affiliateprogramdomain.com will I see any benefits on my domain? My point is that my domain is just the "middle man"...will google look at the link as if it linked directly to mydomain.affiliateprogramdomain.com and just 'cut the middle man out', i.e. not give my domain any of the link weight? That is, is there a benefit in terms of SEO for my domain to have them link to mydomain.com and then redirect it, or will the effect be the same as if they were linking to mydomain.affiliateprogramdomain.com directly? It would be quite a bit of work to convince my affiliates to change their links, so I just want to make sure it even makes sense to do it.