Affiliate Links: are they spidered?

Hello folks,
I have a Affiliate Program is working very good. A typical affiliate link on my network looks like the following one:

http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/?af=affiliatenickname


where "af" passes the affiliate nickname to our system for tracking purposes.

Well, my question is: how Google as well other search engines spider those links? Are they indexed as they are found or they are truncated till the "?" symbol?

Any thought is very welcome...

Thank you in advance!

Sincerely,
Fabrizio

They are spidered. And sometimes their affiliate URL will replace yours in the search engines. Espeically if they have more power than you.

Thank you Egol for your reply and information.

So, you mean that if an affiliate is spidered and Google finds my link with the following URL:

http://www.virtualsheemusic.com/?af=affiliatenickname

and the following anchor text (for example):

"Sheet Music Downloads"

it could replace my own, clean url:

http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com


in the search results for "sheet music downloads"?

Did I correctly understand? About your mentioned "power", are anyway always my pages to be spidered so why the power of my affiliates would affect the spidering of my own pages?

Thank you again.

Sincerely,
Fabrizio Ferrari

Yes, that is correct. My affiliate URL has replaced the URL of the program owner in Yahoo, MSN and Google for many terms. I have more links into their site than any other affiliate and I get credit for the search engine sales from these terms. My URL is not 100% stable for these terms (sometimes their clean URL holds the spot, sometimes it is the URL of another affilite) but it is there most of the time.

I will continue to give them lots of direct links as long as this holds. When I have removed their links to experiment with the products of another program their site dropped like a rock in the search results - so they don't complain about giving me credit for these SE sales.

I don't understand exactly how this works and why. Maybe someone else can tell us?

Actually this is an issue I'd like to understand even because I don't know how to solve it! How to arrange affiliate links in a affiliate network without to lose PR in Google and ranking in search engines?

Any idea is very welcome!

Thank you again EGOL.

Sincerely,
Fabrizio Ferrari

I had an idea today: if I redirect users and spiders arriving from the affiliate links to the same page but without the "?af=affiliatenick" part?

Here it could be:

1 - The spider reads the link as:

http://www.mysite.com/?af=affiliatenickname

2 - The page will redirect the spider (or the user) to the same page without the "?ad=affiliatenickname".. but this 'before' to display the actual page...

3 - So the resultant page will be the same page but with the correct URL without the "?af=affiliatenickname" part...


Do you think it could work?

Any thought is very welcome!

Thank you again.

Fabrizio.

I think that you need expert help from someone who understands this clearly. Messing with redirects can get you in big trouble with google.

Can anyone answer this?

EGOL, asked me to help answer this. I am glad he did, I think I can answer this. ;-)

Ok, there are better ways to do this without doing a page redirect in order to force out the affiliate url. I am guessing that you don't want the affiliate to get credit for those links? I wouldn't worry about it unless Google has spidered all the affiliate urls, and no one can reach your site without it.

If you do established a redirect for the affiliate link, depending on the type of redirect, you could either. 1. get penalized 2. be fine. Most affiliate programs do catch with some type of affiliate program, or cookie before the regular url goes back to normal: http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com

Most stop any potential spider from going forward. There are a lots of affiliate links, but the ones that can be spidered as EGOL points out are pretty darn fun to SEO.

Another option that would simplify this, and prevent spiders from catching the affiliate url. If you have an in-house affiliate program, one that is on your server and you can edit. You can put the script in a different folder, so that instead of

http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/?af=sdasdjaksdh
you can have:
http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/redirect/?af=sadasdklh

Block the /redirect/ folder in robots.txt, to prevent spider from moving forward.

You might also look at:

http://www.google.com/search?q=allinurl:www.virtualsheetmusic.com/%3F&hl=en&lr=&c2coff=1&rls=GGLD,GGLD:2004-23,GGLD:en&start=0&sa=N

Phoenix,
thank you for your reply and information.

Yes, that solution was the first one I thought about... but I'd like to gain PR and popularity from my affiliate links, so I'd like to be not obliged to put affiliate links to a sub-folder... obviously if that's the only way to avoid problems, I will go ahead and I will do it... but by reading many forums online, I found that by applying a 301 redirect before to display the page with the "clean" URL shouldn't have any problems with spiders since 301 redirects ("Moved Permanently") is a HTTP standard and it shouldn't hurt. What do you think?

Any thought and personal experience is very appreciated!

Thank you guys for your kind attention on this matter.

Sincerely,
Fabrizio

PS: Actually I have already applied this technique on my affiliate links, just a few lines of PHP code and it works.

Some programs block the affiliate from getting credit for the Search Engine sales and some allow the affiliate to have that credit. There are plus and minus elements to each of these - for both the program owner and for the affiliate partner.

I am an affiliate so I am biased, however, it could be a win-win situation to give the affiliate an opportunity to own the search engine links. Here is what I can tell you about a couple programs that I participate in. For both of these I am one of the strongest partners and have the ability to give thousands of affiliate links from many different websites. This linkage boosts their site in the search engines generally but also specifically for the terms that I use in my anchor text.

If I have an opportunity to own the SE links then I will be sure that they get a lot of links - enough so that I am the domiant affiliate and I am the one who gets credit for those links most of the time. When I have my sites set up for that purpose they hold good positions in the search results on terms where my sites are not positioned and between us we cover a lot of turf. I give them valuable optimization advice that sets their site up for this additional reach in the search engines, plus addional suggestions that has boosted their conversion rates.

However, if I was not concerned about owning their SE and helping them cover terms where I have no presence I could set up my site in a different way that funnels traffic to the central sales pages where my own merchandise is on display and cut the links that they get from me to 5% of what they currently receive. When my sites are set up that way their positions in the search engines drop like a rock, they get fewer sales from me (and I get more sales from my own products) PLUS their position in the SERPs is not at the high levels and broad reach that they currently enjoy.

Bottom line... we work as a team and talk by phone frequently, making decisions that give us more sales together than either of use would have working alone. Sure they give me some commissions from the SERPs that they normally would keep but without my links their competitors would be kicking their *** and I could be working for those very competitors if it were not for the SERP conversions that give me additional income.

The attitude that you have towards your affiliates can in large part determine your success. You can draw a hard black line that divides them from you or you can make them a partner who will work with you and fight as hard for you as they would fight for themselves.

Would be interesting to see how the rel="nofollow" attribute would affect these links and your rankings

Egol,
I perfectly understand your point of view and I agree about the partnership that must be between the merchant and the affiliate, but in my case I had already an excellent PR with my major keywords (for excellent I mean: at the 1 place on Google!), so this issue is simply hurting me. I have lost PR since my affiliate system started and now I am experimenting the redirect solution to see if I will be able to regain my old PR. I will let you know my experiences.

Thank you!

Fabrizio

Sorry for late reply. I am up to my neck in work. :-)

The 301 redirects should be fine for redirecting the spiders to your homepage for getting credit for the links. I am trying to jogg my memory as to anything that might cause problem with this, but I come up with nothing. You should be safe, I guess the only tedious part of this will be the coding in php for each url.

Let us know how it goes. :-)

Good thread and info. Thanks all. I had an affiliate that wiped out and replaced a client's listing for his most important keywords. Client was not a happy camper.
Thanks again for the info.