sites with ?referer=GHI in address

hey all the sites at my website have "?referer=GHI" at the end. Does anybody have information on whether google cares or not? Sarah said that this might hurt the ranking because it makes every page look like a referer link

 

Do you mean all the pages at your site or all the external links?

 

all the pages at my site

 

I would remove it. How has it got there in the first place????

 

i dont really know, i didnt create the site... i was just brought in to do seo. Seems like there are a lot better ways to figure out who the referer was, and i dont even think we're doing any paid ads other then yahoo and google.

 

is referer used as "affiliate" ID? If so, removing it would destroy the whole affiliate structure resulting in a lot of affiliates angry for not receiving the due money.

If they are used as referal links, well, you can't really do anything about it. But if it's only for internal work, there's other way to deal with variables.

 

I always 301 redirect afffiliate links to the homepage after setting a cookie to remove these duplicate pages.

 

You can remove it by editing your .htaccess file or uploading a blank one .
you can google for information about .htaccess .

 

i'm planning to just remove it completely except for on set landing pages. It seems that landing pages tend to convert better anyhow, and ill just pop some robot tags on there.

 

Remove it on every single page. Why would you use robot tags? They died in 1997.

 

doesnt google respect the no index command?

 

Why would you want to not have your pages indexed?