Affiliate Pages

[ihelpyou]

Okay. Does anyone believe that the regular search engines ..Not the directories, would treat a page like this:

yourdomainname.com/pagename?=IDnumber

the same exact way they would treat this:

yourdomain.com/pagename.htm

??

I truly believe a search engine such as Google would give the regular url with good unique content much more preference than any o'l affiliate page that might have Many pages on the net of exactly the same content. I would also say that an affiliate page has a much harder time getting indexed than a regular page, and might not get indexed at all.

Any opinions about this?

[Advisor]

In the past, I would have agreed with you. However, I have seen some evidence lately that they're starting to sometimes index those types of links. Not sure why. I wouldn't if I were them, but I've seen it with some of my own affiliate links.

J

[ihelpyou]

Oh yes, I know they sometimes do index those links. The key word there is "sometimes". And only if there may be compelling reasons for them to do so, as if when a directory happens, just happens to list an affiliate page.

Does anyone think those links are given the same weight as a regular good, quality page once and if they are listed?

Common sense tells me a search engine certainly does not like duplicate content in the databases and so would not give the same relevance to an affiliate page and a regular page.

[Advisor]

I agree, but it does make me wonder why they've started indexing them. They didn't used to.

J

[ihelpyou]

Well, it makes sense to index Only if the page is customized by the site owner and does not simply copy another affiliate page. That does make sense to me to list the page IF it is unique.

But I still think the se's would not give the same weight to these pages even if they do possess unique content.

[excell]

regardless of what we think should or should not be, the search engine algos are set to index content regardless of the url of the page... depending on content and other weighing factors what we see is what we get!

[Advisor]

I'm not really sure what you mean by the "page." It's more the link that we're talking about, no?

The way I see it, and what I thought you were talking about is you have say a page that sells an ebook.

You have a regular link for it, say yoursite.com/your-ebook.

You sign up affiliates, and they use links like yousite.com/your-ebook?their-affiliate-id

There is only one page, but many different links from other people's sites that point to that page, all with varying URLS such as yousite.com/your-ebook?their-affiliate-id-1, yousite.com/your-ebook?their-affiliate-id-2, etc.

Is this what you're talking about? If so, I have seen some of those kinds of links in Google's database lately.

As for how they treat the page itself, I have no idea. If I were Google, I would only want to use the actual page URL and not the affiliate ones, but that doesn't seem to be what's happening lately.

Jill

[bodyboy909]

Many CGI based shopping carts and database sites use these types of URLs to link to the different pages of categories and products. A search engine would not know the difference between a affiliate URL and a shopping cart product URL except by the content of the page. The search engines want to index these URLs because the shopping carts have unique and specific content on them. I doubt they want the Affiliate links because of duplicate content but how are they going to know the difference except by matching up the similar content of two pages on the same domain? Will it get indexed? Possibly. will it get ranked? Unlikely unless you make sure it has some unique content.

I hope that makes some sence,
Vince-

[jhartman007]

Hello,

I work to assist our affiliates in promoting their sites, Time after time I have found that if you build out the static version of the page it does much much better. Although I have been finding that our affiliate links are being spidered to a certain point (with extremely LOW rankings.

Actually now that I look at it the affiliate links have been removed from the google ranking? hmmm.....

Only if the site itself has a high rating in google. One pattern which I have found and am now in the process of testing is that if you have the affiliate link 3 layers into the site the site will do better. If I didnt know any better I would say that your site is almost penelized if you have too many affiliate links.