metatag NOINDEX or 301 redirect... what's best for my situation?

Here's my situation. I have a site and my entire site uses SEO friendly URLs. I have affiliates and they link to my site using no SEO friendly URL's.

That being said, some of my URLs in SE's are not my SEO friendly ones... they're my affiliate URL's which are not keyword optimized. So not only do they rank worse, but when people do click on those links in the SE's my affiliates get credit (when they shouldn't be getting credit).

So... this leaves me with 2 things I can do and I'm not quiet sure which ones is my best option right now. They are:

1.) I can use the metatags NOINDEX on all my dynamic pages. This way, SE's will not index the pages in their results from affiliates linking to my site. This option is the easiest and makes sense. It works... and in time my dynamic links should be dropped from the SE's.

2.) Now this option, I think "may" be the best if it can work correctly. I'm using ASP pages so I can do a 301 redirect using ASP code. The reason I'd use the ASP code is 1.) I can place it after enough code so my affiliates still get credit for the clickthrough, and 2.) I can grab some information from my database to re-write the SEO friendly URL.

Option 2 has a lot of great points. All my old links still work, I get credit for all links coming in, and even though there may be 100 different links pointing to one product, 1 URL will get credit for all 100 links.

Here's where I'm concerned though. Will SE's follow the 301 redirect or will they continue to list the page in their SE's using the affiliate non seo friendly URL? Since it's not being 301 redirected from the server, the page is loading for the SE. I think some SE's may consider the page still a valid page. Also, maybe SE's could hurt your rankings if you're redirecting from a page that's already loading (ie... maybe they think you could be cloaking... loading one page the SE sees and then reloading (invisible to the human viewer)).

What are your opinions? It would be great to redirect and still retain PR among other things. But I'm not sure about the downsides to doing this and if it will actually remove affiliate URL's from SE's.

Your opinions are welcome

 

Over time the 301 redirect will replace the other pages in the results, 301 usually takes a few weeks to kick in.

Listings in the search engine happen after your site gets crawled, i dont think spiders crawl their own index, but maybe.

 

Yes... I know... but is the same for 301 redirects placed at the end of pages instead of being processed before the server loads? I've read, and it's been mentioned by numerous people, that some people have had issues getting SE's to pick up the redirect using the redirect within a page instead of from the server's side.