I'm not really sure where to put this. Everything with our store is fine with google... but on MSN and Yahoo many of our links are affiliate links instead of our static SEO links. We provide a select few affiliates with our product database that includes their affiliate URL's. They can add this database to their site and create sort of a mini-store. All the products and prices are shown on their end and they can create a link for their members to click on to end up on our store. Problem is, Yahoo, and now MSN, are following the links from their site to ours. We used to have all our static links indexed by Yahoo and MSN and everything was fine. But recently they've been picking up our dynamic links from affiliates. Now... you would think their spider would find a link from their site, visit our site, and then continue to spider our site using our static URL's. But the spiders from Yahoo and now MSN don't seem to be doing that. They seem to be following the links from affiliates and using those URL's instead. For example... if you do a search on yahoo for "BSN Cellmass" We're #1. The URL for that link is: supplements101.com/store/affiliate.asp?ID=2949&ProductCode=bsncellmass However... that URL should be: supplements101.com/store/Cellmass_p/bsncellmass.htm Why do I care? Well... we pay affiliates 15% of ever sale. 15% in our industry is pretty much all of our profit after expenses. Sometimes we make even less then that. We have no problem paying affiliates for their referals and we don't mind losing money in order to get a customer... but it's not right that they're getting referals from search engines like this. The search engines should contain our natural links and not affiliate links. Knowing that... what can we do? Easy answer is not give affiliates our database anymore and make them create links manually. Problem is... SE's can still follow the links they create on their own and use those as our store's URL's. So my question is... is there anything we can do on our end to stop SE's from using those affiliate URL's? Maybe there's something we can do on our Windows 2003 server... or maybe include some sort of code in our affiliate.asp file to allow users to be re-directed to the product page but tell the SE's to stop and not index that page. We can try telling our affiliates that use this system to start using the rel=nofollow in the anchor tags but they may choose not to do that and that also cuts down on inbound links I'm just looking for ideas on what the best thing to do would be. Now that I think about it... maybe inlcuding /store/affiliate.asp in the robots.txt file would solve this problem. But... the spiders are not finding these URL's from our site... so I doubt this would work. Any ideas?
You can't have it both ways-- link popularity AND nofollows. I think putting affiliate.asp in your robots will suss it as Old Welsh Guy said. At least your post reminded me of your store.... and you have LEUK in stock we'll sell some for you today. You should send me a datafeed to import.
We actually sold out of it today. But we should have another shipment coming in from MuscleTech this week. If you want our datafeed sign up as an affiliate and email us your affiliate ID saying you want our datafeed. I'll get it over to you ASAP.