Will using 302 temp redirect for affiliate links affect Google SEO?

[MobileDealsNow]

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Hello everyone,

This is my first post on this incredibly useful forum (I know, you're probably sick of the "first post" comments) so I'd just like to say thank you for a great resource. I'm sure I will have a lot of other questions to post in the future, and I can see from reading other posts that feedback is always helpful

Now on to my question... I am in the process of setting up an affiliate website which will deeplink to over 200 product links (mostly TradeDoubler). The pages will be in HTML and each will be SEO optimised, and each product will have its own page.

I have been searching this forum for the last few days and have came to the conclusion that using a temporary 302 direct in the .htaccess file for my affiliate links seems to be the best option (preventing interference from Norton, ease of use for the vast amount of links, no ugly URL in status bar etc). To clarify, the line in htaccess will look something like this:

Redirect www.mysite.com/link/deal123 http://tracker.tradedoubler.com/etc

I have three related questions regarding this, to which I would be infinitely grateful for help with:

1) Am I right in thinking that I don't actually HAVE to create a directory or fille called "/link/deal123" and I just put this on the .htacess file? I have tested this without creating the directory and it works fine but not sure if Google will like this from a SEO point of view. Will the big G think I'm up to no good when I'm not?

2) Also relating to SEO... Will having a lot of temporary 302 redirects affect PR? I know permanent redirects might but not sure if 302 will be OK or not. Even though the "/link/" directory only exists as a ref in .htaccess, should I try banning it in robots.txt anyway to make sure?

3) Finally and most importantly... will the sales track?

I'm also not sure whether the networks approve of this or not. I'm not trying to spam the engines or be sly to create a higher PR - the ONLY reason I want to use this htaccess method is to make adding/changing the links easier (ie. I only have to edit the affiliate codes in ONE htaccess file - not on each of the 200 HTML pages!). I'm also aware that using htaccess means I can't use the TD tracking images for stats - I'm fine with this.

All other links on the site will be standard <a href> it is only the 200+ affiliate links that, when clicked, will redirect to merchant in new window.

Apologies for such a long post, I hope somebody out there can help me with this. I've spent a looooong time creating this website and don't want its PR on Google to be affected by anything (that is, when I actually finish and submit it of course).

Thanks for your help!

Keith

[dmc]

I've just replyed to this on another thread. Avoid 302 (temp) redirects - Google wont follow them (Yahoo and MSN are OK though) - only use 301's. Avoid having different URLs from outside the site that point to the same content (another Google issue) as Google may consider that to be duplicate content and drop the index.

I've been through all this the hard way.