Affiliate Links and Search Engines

[David@MPL]

Hello All,

After reading a thread in the V7 forum about a little php program that can be used to link directly to products, I'm a little unsure as to whether that sort of thing bothers search engine spiders/robots. This, in turn, has got me wondering about how search engines cope with links from affiliates seen as they don't link directly to your site.

So, my question is, can spiders/robots follow affiliate links to your site (and thus improve your ranking) and can they follow programs like the one in the above thread.

Thanks in advance,

[Mike Hughes]

Google has traditionally been the best search engine at following complex links although I'm sure the main engines all do something pretty similar these days.

In Google's case their behaviour to a link depends on the link and the server response. (You can check the server response to any particular link here: http://www.searchengineworld.com/cgi...ervercheck.cgi)

The main responses are as follows:

200 OK - The server is saying that the file requested is OK and here it is.

The trouble with affiliate links and other indirect links getting a 200 OK reponse is that it tells google that the file asked for in the link is the one it gets back. It will thus assume the link is to a valid filename and index the page received as the content for that filename (i.e. www.url.com/acatalog/php?xyz for example).

302 Tempory Redirect

A Temporary Redirect response tells google that the file asked for does exist but cannot be served and to use the page redirected to for the moment. Again Google will assume that the link is to a valid filename and will index the page received as the content for that filename.

301 Permanent Redirect

A permanent redirect tells Google that the file asked for no longer exists and it should use the page redirected to instead. In this case google assumes that the link is pointing to the new file and will credit the link PR and anchor text to the final destination page rather than the one pointed to in the link.

So in Googles case, the only time a page will benefit from an indirect links PR and anchor text is when a 301 Permanent Redirect is used.

The added complexity to this though is that it's been said in the past that Google was trying to identify affiliate links so it could ignore them. So even if you do use a 301 permanent redirect Google may well recognise the link as an affiliate link and not count it anyway.

Mike

[David@MPL]

Thanks Mike, that explains alot

I've just gone and tested this and Anthony's product.php solution returns a 301 response while our affiliate referral script returns a 302 reponse. That in itself explains why google displays our affiliates links as pages when you do a specific site search.

Cheers,