For one of our sites We have affiliate id's tacked on the end. We have used a 301 redirect to make sure that once user hits the site the affiliate id ?affiliate=1234 is recorded in a cookie and the ID is no longer shown to the user. This has worked perfectly well on Yahoo and Google and on MSN (until recently). Now MSN believes that each f our affiliate's links are independent pages and it has listings for all of them. Is there a way to tell MSN that these are all the same page? Anyone else having this issue?
not really sure if you could block that with robots.txt if it's just a standard affil?=34 at the end of a url, but I could be wrong. it'd be quite easy to block it if you rewrote it to /affil/34/ at the end of the url though if you're 301ing, I wouldn't worry too much: you're doing things right, msn isn't. they'll sort it out eventually.
MSN has a bug at the moment which means it can't understand 301 redirects. This seems to be a pretty major thing to me and I am sure they are sorting it out. The end result is the whole index is full of pages that should not be there. As long as you are handling the links right (which I think you are) then you just need to wait for MSN to sort it out.
Mad4 - thanks for the info. It's a big pain as it looks like this is a reason why MSN is no longer treating our site well. ANy idea whether MSN is working on this?