How should I deal with the affiliate URLs we create through our affiliate program?

[nick.leech]

Our website offers an affiliate program and every affiliate gets a link http://www.ourwebsite.com/?affiliateID.

Because we get many such links we use redirects to avoid duplicate content. Unfortunately we have 302 redirects set up and I want to make them 301. Many of our affiliates build backlinks using their http://www.ourwebsite.com/?affiliateID as the URL. If such links were redirected through a 301, would they pass any juice? Can our site get penalized by search engines for having backlinks to URLs that contain affiliate IDs, URLs that are 301 redirected to our homepage lets say?

[Dr-Pete]

It depends a bit on the scale - if you have a massive amount of affiliate links, they could get devalued, so some people have masked them in the past. The 302 does that, in a sense, but it also blocks the link-juice (or most of it). The 301 redirect would pass the link-juice, but there's a little more risk. If you're talking about 1000s of affiliate links and that's 90% of your link profile, I'd be careful. If it's just one part of your link-building strategy, it's probably not a big risk.

As Istvan mentioned, the canonical tag is another option. Visitors would still see the affiliate URL (which may or may not be ideal, depending on your own business model), but search engines would pass link-juice to the target page. In that case, I'd make the canonical page match the landing page (the home-page might not be a good bet) - it's a bit situational.

This post is a couple of years old, but it covers the basic options:

http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/022446.html

[eunaneunan]

don't mean to high-jack the question, but is setting up affiliates this way a good seo strategy? does google see this as a cheap way to get backlinks, or does it see it as a legit way as it must be a "good site" if so many people are affiliates of it?   Its and Idea i have to thinking of doing myself.

Btw i agree with Istvan, canonical and webmaster tools "ignore affiliate parameter" would be the way I would (will?) do it

[Keszi]

Hi Sorin,

I would work this issue out trough Google Webmaster tools. It would be a possible solution to set up the parameter and tell Google to ignore it.

This way you wont have duplicate content issues because of the affiliate parameter in your links.

Another solution to this would be to insert in each and every page a canonical to itself (this way example.com/?affiliateID would have a canonical set up to example.com)

Another one: the solution that you have provided, but I wouldn't redirect all of them to the homepage. Just think as a user, you go on a link that should point to a product, then you get redirected to a homepage... what would you do? I would close the "tab".

301 and canonical will loose some of the link juice provided but still pass on somewhere close to 85-90%.

I hope this was helpful,

Istvan