Affiliate Links and Search Engines
 

I started wondering today whether it makes a difference for search engines if programs would have affiliates link to www.paysite.com/index.php?wid=1234 instead of something like www.paysite.com/wm.php?wid=1234 or www.paysite.com/wm/1234/

Google by my knowledge gives every page an individual pagerank and a general combined pagerank for the domain, so if www.paysite.com/index.php has a high pagerank instead of wm.php, then maybe it is measured into google's global pagerank for the domain www.paysite.com and results in better listings for the domain.

Am I onto something here?

SEO = Free pussy

depends on the script

you mean on the search engine?

page.php?wm=23
page.php?wm=23534
page.php?wm=422

*can* be seen as 3 pages. it's hard to say if it always is seen as that, there are uncertainties. i expect at least that in the future google can distinguish between page=1, page=2, page=3 and referer=1,referer=2, referer=3 thanks to on page factors.

yes, what i'm wondering is if a domain will get _more_ added to pagerank when affiliates links to www.paysite.com or www.paysite.com/index.php, instead of www.paysite.com/wm.php

all depends on the script

yes, google distinguishes between .php?page=1 and and .php?wm=2 and .php?wm=1234 ....but what about www.paysite.com/?1234 one could do the $http_get_vars[0] parameter catching for example... does google count it same as www.paysite.com and if so will it give extra bonus.

True enough.
Check your log files. If you see the robots hitting (in this example) page.php repeateadly with different IDs (wm=123, wm=456, etc.) it's a sign it *may* be seeing them as different pages.

Next, do a site:[domain] search a see if these URLs are getting listed - likely they will just be a URL with no description or cache (for Google). If so, the pages are definetly being seen as different pages.

One solution is to "cloak" robots by 301ing the page to a blank URL (page.php?wm=123 -> page.php). You likely won't get penalized as the 2 pages are the same.

But whatever you do, under NO circumstance, use ID= (as in, page.php?ID=123). Google says straight out "don't" - it often will see this as a session ID - another bad thing to be passing in URLs...

For the complete story, fixes, etc. hit me up. I offer a special "Affiliate Linking SEO Done The Right Way" seminar for $1200/hour.
:)

ahaaa.... so if we'd use www.paysite.com/index.php?id=1234, would google count it as www.paysite.com/index.php ? - Cause if it would seem to google that all affiliates would be linking to the same page - index.php, index.php would get a better pagerank instead of it being divided by multiple pages... then again, a site's total pagerank is also measured by the number of pages it has, so which is better index.php having an excellent pagerank, incase the above ?id= trick would work, or the site having more pages and a total higher pagerank.

Third, if the site has more pages only due to wm code, the content would be similar/same, so there could be a danger of being penalized for that.

So in short the choice is whether to "cloack" the parameter pages into page.php and get a higher pagerank for those pages. Or get the pages measured as separate pages, increasing the site's total page rank, but also the chance of getting penalized due to identical content.

SEO with a good niche means money, conversions and rebills!

...i've been also wondering whether those short and "informational" posts are really smart bots or really cheap philippinos :winkwink:

My current conclusion is that the best method SEO wise would be to use www.paysite.com/?id=1234 + extra cloaking mentioned above, incase some bots also read the id parameter, this way www.paysite.com/ would gather the most pagerank. Anyone disagree? :)

Downside is that most heavily trafficked page - index.* would have extra code.

post your real link, I have an idea on how to run it through google.