I just came across the holy grail of google SEO!

[net_veteran]

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Has anyone ever seen anything like this:

On a web page I have links to merchants with my affiliate ID.
For example (these are made up):
http://www.merchantxyz.com/folder/pr...filiateid=9999

Google appears to have followed those links from my page and indexed the target page on the merchants website and has now included that page in it's search results with MY affiliate link!!!

So searching for the above product on google now returns (on the first results page):

Headline of the merchants product page
description taken from product page, blah blah blah
http://www.merchantxyz.com/folder/pr...filiateid=9999
^^^
my link to merchant with my affiliate ID!!!

I'm baffled google seems to be working for me...

[kier]

It's likely this will work itself out after a while so I wouldn't get too excited. More to the point if the merchant finds out they aren't going to be happy and understandably so.

[net_veteran]

It's likely this will work itself out after a while so I wouldn't get too excited. More to the point if the merchant finds out they aren't going to be happy and understandably so.

I agree but it's not my fault, I didn't do anything at all to make this happen!
(All I did was place the link they provided to me, onto my web page)

I think I understand what happened, that page of the merchant was never indexed before by google so my direct deep link was the first and only 'path' for google to reach it.

Obviously the merchant's web site is very google unfriendly as that product page is not new, so it should have been indexed long before google found my direct link.

The merchant should really be thankful to me anyway because my link helped his product page appear on the first page of google when searching for that product.

I assume the merchant could fix this via the google webmaster tools by telling google to ignore (or rather rewrite) links that match a particular pattern?
I don't use google webmaster tools but I have seen such a feature in the yahoo webmaster tools.

Anyway, did anyone here ever experience this before?

[net_veteran]

I looked into this further and found there are hundreds of direct product links to this particular merchant from google with affiliate IDs in the links (only two links are with my aff ID).

Some affiliates of this merchant must have been creaming off for quite a while there...

[trooperbill]

lol do some link building to your page on their site and make £££