Thanks so much for the responses, guys. You've reaffirmed my suspicions. Someone had suggested using a 301 but I believe that method could potentially interfere with the affiliate tracking.
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Posts made by ATIseo
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RE: Affiliate URLs Indexed in Googleposted in Affiliate Marketing
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Affiliate URLs Indexed in Googleposted in Affiliate Marketing
We have an active in-house affiliate program which has a create-a-link function where affiliate, as in most affiliate programs, can build links back to our content to produce sales.
The problem that I am seeing is that some of the affiliate URL versions are being indexed in Google rather than the original page. For instance..
http://www.ourdomain.com/page_start.aspx?affnum=F025212&Start_Page=RaceCar&referrer=createlink
is outranking...
http://www.ourdomain.com/racecar
This presents 2 issues for us. First, this presents duplicate content issues obviously. Second, we pay our affiliates a portion of the sales so, in order to maximize profitability, we'd like the indexed pages to be the original version.
What's the best way to handle this? I want to make sure that affiliates continue to get credit for links from their sites but search engine links should go to the original versions.