Inbound Affiliate Link Strategy

[pintofmilk]

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We are putting the finishing touches to an affiliate program and deciding how to track inbound traffic from affiliate sites. We want to create a scheme that will be positive for SEO inbound links and make sure that affiliate URLs are not indexed by search engines.

These are the ideas so far:

1) Use standard site URLs that do not use any tracking codes and we detect referrer URL to credit sales to right affiliate. Some sales will not be properly tracked but we could increase commission payments on sales that are tracked to compensate for this.

2) Use a query string and redirect, e.g.
domain.com/tracker.php?affiliate_id=44&url=Ritz-hotel.html
sets affiliate cookie to affiliate_id 44 and redirects to:
domain.com/Ritz-hotel.html

3) Use a re-written URL and redirect, e.g.
domain.com/a44/Ritz-hotel.html
sets affiliate cookie to affiliate_id 44 and redirects to:
domain.com/Ritz-hotel.html

Which if any is the best scheme or is there a better approach?

Thanks
Ben

[joedavies1987]

Are you using inhouse software for this?

There's iDev Affiliate that will do this right out the box, using a 301 redirect.

Affiliate links to yoursite.com/affcode and it 301's to yoursite.com

Joe

[pintofmilk]

Hey Joe, thanks for the tip but we are going to build this into the site in-house... just want to make sure we build the best solution!