Help with a Variable Issue ?

[JohnC]

I have an issue I have been tying to work through with my programmers for a couple of months now. We are not making much progress, so I thought I would pick some brains around here.

We have an affiliate program and assign affiliate codes to each Webmaster who is promoting us. The codes are then added to the links to our site in this manner:

http://www.websitename.com/index.asp?trackerid=123 My problem is with Google. Google has been spidering our site though links off of our affiliate sites and indexing the pages with the variable. The problem comes when I get 10 versions of the same page indexed because Google sees them all as different pages even though the only difference is the affiliate variable in the URL.

We have tried redirects in the global.asa (works, but breaks other things), does anyone one have any other suggestions?

[polarmate]

Try using robots.txt to disallow the URLS with trackerid.
See http://www.ihelpyouservices.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&postid=143855#post143855

[JuniorHarris]

Another suggestion might be to inject a noindex robots metatag whenever there is an affiliate id present for the page. This will still allow the default (having no affiliate id) to be indexed (sans-nonindex).

[Webmaster T]

Is there a reason that you don't want all the pages indexed? IMO, at some point Google will figure out it is duplicate content. You may also have some angry affiliates when they realize that you made changes to remove their pages from the index. I would read the Google guidelines carefully as I don't think you will receive the PR benefit you believe this will provide. I'm assuming that you want all the links to point at a single page. This may be a case of "if it ain't broken don't fix it".

One way to get around this is to track by referrer. The problem with that is links from newsletters etc. have no referrers so you'll want to explain workarounds to your affiliates. Internally you just associate the referrer to an affiate ID in the DB.

[polarmate]

You may also have some angry affiliates when they realize that you made changes to remove their pages from the index.
John has a similar problem to mine. Where the affiliate pages are on their own web sites and not on mine. They link to my web site using a tracker ID or affiliate ID. Their pages are not being removed. Mine are. And it makes a lot of sense. Because they are not promoting my site when my URL with a trackerID shows up in the SERPs, the search engines are. The click and the sale is then referred by the search engine and not by the affiliate. If someone clicks on that URL on the affiliate's page, that's fine with me - they referred the customer.

Incidentally I am seeing many URLs with tracking IDs as backlinks to my site after this latest update even though I have excluded them through the robots.txt file. They show with no snippet so I am assuming that they will be dropped in the next update.

It depends on whether you are OK with this or not. It's not OK with us as each individual sale $$ is high. The affiliate gets a 10% commission on a sale referred by a search engine simply because the URL had his tracker ID on it. The URL with the affiliate's tracker ID is getting higher visibility in the SERPs not because of the promotion that s/he is doing but because of the visibility of our web site.

[JohnC]

Sorry I didn’t respond yesterday... I was under the weather and stayed home...

Polarmate has hit the nail on the head. That is our situation exactly. We are first page for many terms and allot of them show our URL with the tracker ID of our affiliates. It seems to rotate between about 3-4 of our main affiliates and us. I estimate we have paid out over 6 figures to our affiliates based on Google traffic alone last year. While great for our affiliates, that's 6 figures that should have stayed in house.

I have also found that one internal page of our site may have as many as ten listings. I am a bit worried that this alone may cause problems. I can't disallow these pages, as they are also "our" pages. The only difference is the addition of a tracker code at the end of the URL. At the moment we are trying a bit of code in the global.asa that looks for the TrackerID on an incoming page request if it finds one, it strips the id from the URL (after storing the info) the redirects the browser back to the page minus the ID. Not sure if this will help either. It looks good on the browser, but I don’t know if the redirect will cause problems with the spiders.
Originally posted by polarmate
John has a similar problem to mine. Where the affiliate pages are on their own web sites and not on mine. They link to my web site using a tracker ID or affiliate ID. Their pages are not being removed. Mine are. And it makes a lot of sense. Because they are not promoting my site when my URL with a trackerID shows up in the SERPs, the search engines are. The click and the sale is then referred by the search engine and not by the affiliate.

[JuniorHarris]

Would it be possible to trap the trackers/referrals and issue a 302 temporary redirect to the original page? Would the spider not then be forwarded to, and hopefully only list that page? [Where is Alan?] This too would probably cause the affiliate listings to get dropped, which may or may not be a good thing. If they [affiliate listings] are driving traffic the site alone would not gather, then it could result in some lost revenue. Granted commissions are being paid, but it's still lost revenue.

[JohnC]

Originally posted by JuniorHarris
Would it be possible to trap the trackers/referrals and issue a 302 temporary redirect to the original page? Would the spider not then be forwarded to, and hopefully only list that page? We are currently using "Response.Redirect", my programmer working on this is out today so I cant ask him. Is this equivalent to a 302 or would another method be better?
Originally posted by JuniorHarris
This too would probably cause the affiliate listings to get dropped, which may or may not be a good thing. If they [affiliate listings] are driving traffic the site alone would not gather, then it could result in some lost revenue. Granted commissions are being paid, but it's still lost revenue. I believe that since the page ranked is OUR page, the rankings would not change. Another reason I believe this is due to the fact that the URLs shown rotate between the affiliates and us. Yes the affiliates would loose revenue and this is something we would need to manage. I don’t believe however we would loose much if any ranking. I do notice that the different versions of our URL (different IDs) do have different PR and backlinks, I am kinda hoping once those are all seen as the root page (ours) that some of that weight will transfer to our page. Who knows?

[polarmate]

Response.Redirect will send a 302 unless you specifically issue a 301. Confirm this by using WebBug with http/1.1.