Affiliate schemes

What are your views on affiliate schemes and whether they can be detrimental to page rank?

For example, in general, when you set up an affiliate scheme, you need some kind of query string with an affiliate id in the link to your site, which makes every inbound link point to a different page in the eyes of Google.

Anybody know of any ways around this?

I don't see how it would be detrimental to your PR. Look at ebay, which has a large number of affiliate links pointing to it and they have a PR9.

Besides if you have several thousand affiliates sending traffic into your site I wouldn't be too concerned with any adverse effect that would have in your SERPS. Whatever little loss you might experience in SE traffic you would surely make up and exceed with traffic from affiliates.

Perhaps detrimental was the wrong word to use. "Less effective" may have been more apt.

I agree Felice that it isn't worth worrying too hard about since the idea of affiliate schemes is not to increase page rank but to drive targeted traffic through your site. However, since I'm just about to embark on one I wondered what the best solution would be which would also increase my PR.

Not sure watchman, pretty much all of the affiliate software out there uses some sort of dynamic URL for tracking purposes. Sorry that I can't help you more on that.

Thanks Tony (sorry for calling you Felice I misread your name )

I wonder how accurate it would be to use the referer in the HTTP header which gets sent over?

Envisage any issues?

don't do it - the Internet just isn't that reliable