I searched the forum for ideas on Rewrite and how to benefit SEO. I saw postings on how to do it; however not the benefits. My thought is have the SEO submit landing page www.mysite.com. This same www.mysite.com will be used for PPC. My goal is to get the user less clicks to the sale, right? Yes. What about moving the traffic without the "www." to the affiliate program directly? How would this effect my SEO? Would this fall within the white hat programming for most affiliate programs and PPC engines? Example using the .htaccess file RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^shareasale.com$ [NC] RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.mysite.com/$1 [R=301,L]
I would not suggest doing that. You should probably read up on URL canonicalization. Typically, if your domain is example.com then www.example.com and example.com you will want to point to the same page - your home page. Some we sites who are NOT affiliates will link to you without the www... others with... and you have no control over that. So sending all non-www links to your landing page will likely end up sending visitors following non-affiliate links to your landing page. If you have an affiliate program and affiliates are sending traffic to your site then they likely include some query string parameter like affid=12345 on the URL where 12345 identifies the particular affiliate sending you traffic. So you could set up a rewrite rule that anyone sending traffic to ANY page on your site with affid=????? then redirect them to your landing page. You might use something like: Ideally, you should make ALL affilates link to a single page on your site. This makes maintaining your affiliate handling code MUCH simpler. You can make changes in ONE place and affect ALL affiliates. As an example I'll just call this goto.php. So for example, affiliates might link to www.example.com/goto.php?affid=12345. If you want to track the number of visitors each affiliate is sending you, you can put the code here and it will affect all affiliates. If you want to cookie any affid that comes in on a URL then you can put the code here and it will affect all affiliates. If your affiliates can promote one of three different products and you want to show three different landing pages depending on the product then add another query string parameter like lp=promo1 where promo1 indicates to display a landing page for product1. The affiliates might send you traffic then with links that look like www.example.com/goto.php?affid=12345&lp=promo1. The goto.php page could then redirect the user to promo1.php. Now, if you want to test multiple versions of landing pages for product1, the promo1.php page could contain code that rolls the dice to determine which of product1 landing page to show and redirects them to the appropriate landing page. It could log which version of the test landing pages that particular consumer saw, it could cookie the user so that if they return then they will see the same landing page again, and then redirect to the correct version of the landing page. If the user converts, your code on conversion could log the affiliate that sent the traffic, which product converted, and which version of the test page converted. Now you'll have stats on how much traffic each affiliates are sending you... you'll know how many times you showed each possible version of test landing pages for each product... and how many of those converted. So you can tell which landing page converts users the best for each product. After you feel you've gotten enough data on the test versions, pick the one that worked the best and make it the champion... then come up with new "challenger" versions... repeat and rinse...
Thank you for taking the time. It's helpful to better understand programming options. Totally awesome!