How do I tell google to not list ?nats=blah
 

Say I have a site that is domain.com/videos/001/ but it also has the nats linking code domain.com/videos/001/?nats=blah
I want google to only index the domain.com/videos/001/ and treat all nats codes as that page

Robots? Htaccess? Sitemap?
Thanks

may be using robots.txt to disallow?

i am not sure if i understand your question exactly.

I'm guessing he doesn't want affiliate codes indexed by google, but rather the the regular url sans affil code.

explain a little better.... what is on the page you want indexed?


domain.com/videos/001/

is there an index file on that folder?

If you don't want google to index a page, simple use nofollow tag while linking to it. Also disallow via robots.txt .. and it should be fine.

Yes there is an index page on that. Its a php script but in all practical purposes its an index page. I do not want 50 of the same pages listed in google with all different affiliate ids.

Exactly.

How do I tell if to treat all the pages the same without the ?nats=affiliateid ?

Is this a 301 redirect thing?

this should work for googlebot anyways if you put it in robots.txt:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /*?

that will disallow any url with a '?' in it so your index.php will be ok

(you have to put the path for the disallow in for the directories though, not sure how you are set up exactly if there is an easy way to do the whole site)

the more I think about it I must say I am not sure if putting paths in is necessary or if that will work as is for the entire site... maybe someone can comment?

Why would you want to do this. You are killing your affiliates. Think it over.

Would it work like this too just incase I have something that uses ? and I want to get it listed

User-agent: *
Disallow: /*?nats=

Which program is this?

I don't imagine this will increase your popularity.

I highly doubt its your link power that puts your site in the ranks with the affiliate code, its the affiliates link power that puts them their, google have listed the affiliate page/link for a reason.

Disallowing the indexing of that and taking that traffic from the affiliate is blatent theft.

Are you the sponsor or a webmaster trying to block it?

You have to set the user agent to Google, to use a wild card in the disallow.
If you are the sponsor program. Put the robots.txt file on your money program domain that has your nats/www files. Then you can kill the redirect scripts value (which is the bad thing) and google can choose to use or ignore the duplicate link with the ?nats var or count it's value.

If you block at the ?nats= level, the links won't have any value, not even a link count value, I don't think. And any links - value or not, is a good thing.


Or if you want to hard link your galleries, to keep the best value. You can use a php script to look and see if ?nats is passed in or not. If so, use that nats code. If not, use a default code from the php to build the links to the paysites.

Linking codes hurt paysites/galleries. Webmasters use all types of stupid words, that don't match any text on the gallery. So it looks like a bunch of duplicate links going to the same page, that google can't figure out what the focus is about, since everyone says it's about CLick Here, and the gallery says it's lesbians, google goes, huh? And ends up listing the webmaster with the best value, rather than the gallery which is the honest focus.

Nobody would be stealing anything. Google will not count or list, the entire ?nats= url. It won't drop the ?nats= and give the value to the url without it. Simply because, he would have told google to totally disallow it all the way.

LOL you really should not call some one a theif when you do not know the situation. I use nats to track traffic buys from different spots to a "Blog" or sorts that then links to my paysite.

I just do not want to kill the blogs listings by having 50 duplicate content listings from the different nats ids getting picked up in google .

If its just you sending traffic then its not a big deal and obviously not causing any issues, if there is any affiliates its just not right to noindex the nats code, many webmasters work their nats code to rank for search terms.

I get emailed atleast once a month asking how and why my nats code (or another) is ranking or replacing the paysite root. Its not always because a webmaster has targeted the site name and taken the serp, sometimes its a side-effect of going after bigger terms and the affiliate code takes the spots by default for being a better linked to page.

At first look many program owners see their paysites listed with a referal link and assume that the traffic and search rank should be theirs, but there is a reason the affiliate link is there, it was worked to rank their.

Can you post what program you want this info for so I can stop pushing it please?

Ohh.. if that is the case, you make me laugh...

LOL

Wow... haha... You are so clueless.. hahahhahaa

It is in my interest to actually track the sales back to the original traffic spot. I think I can make it work by dropping a cookie and if no new nats link code it used it should credit the sale back the the place that the traffic first came from.

Think or a mini review site that is buying traffic from google and yahoo and passing in different nats ids that in turn go out to the paysites that track under sub ids . I just do not want to kill the organic rankings by having multiple nats ids listed in google with the same exact content .

Hey Doc and JetJet thanks I think this might work. One more thing is there any way to make that like a 301 redirect so if it does have any link juice it will get passed back to the domain.com /movies/paysite/ from the domain.com /movies/paysite/?nats=blah

that's a good question, in that case I guess you would need to set up a 301 in your htaccess, but wouldn't that redirect also strip off the nats code so you wouldn't be able to use it without a real acrobatic use of logfiles?

I'm guessing you can't have it both ways, but I am far from an expert so this is pretty much a bump for some more input from experts for you....

Hey thanks for your help its much appreciated. Hope you are having a good weekend

One less competitor to worry about... haha...