Rank: Member
Joined: 11/13/2005(UTC)
Posts: 24
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Is it possible to use another non-google-indexed character OTHER than the question mark (e.g. ?affid=losemoneyaffiliateID) in the URL that tracks affiliate referrals? Specifically, may I suggest you use the # character (e.g. #affid=myaffiliatesID) instead --- a character which usually stands for an anchor tag on the same page and which is ignored by the googlebot?
Since google DOES index URLs which have a question mark as UNIQUE pages, AND google penalizes for duplicate content (especially 100% duplicates) using the BVC affiliate URL with the question mark will quickly relegate such pages to the supplemental index at a rate directly proportional to the number of incoming affiliate links and the pages' popularity (e.g. very fast in our case and our home page dropped first).
Soon you will be wondering why you are unranked and scheming of ways to get rid of all your affiliates and/or this extremely thoughtless and harmful design...PLEASE FIX THIS!!!
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Rank: Member
Joined: 3/1/2006(UTC)
Posts: 1,142
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What is the domain of this site? From what we have seen, google ignores querystring parameters if the page can be pulled up without the querystring parameter and displays identical. Are you seeing all of your affiliate links showing up in the google supplemental index? |
Justin Etheredge
Senior Software Engineer
BVSoftware |
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Rank: Member
Joined: 3/1/2006(UTC)
Posts: 1,142
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Also, google allows you to match urls in your robot.txt with wildcards. So you could do something like this:
User-agent: GoogleBot
Disallow: /*?affid=*
You could also redirect all of your affiliate links to /Affiliate.aspx which will redirect the browser to default.aspx. This way the Affiliate.aspx page is the only one that could potentially make it into google's index with querystring params. |
Justin Etheredge
Senior Software Engineer
BVSoftware |
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Rank: Member
Joined: 11/13/2005(UTC)
Posts: 24
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Justin,
Thank you for the suggestion re the robots.txt - we will review it as it might have negative consequences on its' own. We do prefer the # suggestion though, as # is widely used as the anchor tag symbol which is widely understood to be on the SAME page. Thus it is a convention understood by both humans and crawlers and is consistent with Google philosophy.
We can tell you very emphatically that google IS indexing thru the querystring--- we already have 4 pages dumped into supplemental after less than 2 weeks live.
BTW, the # suggestion came from our external SEO consultant (who knew nothing of how we developed the site). This consultant, from one of the world's best known SEO consulting groups ,made the suggestion after noticing our default page and product pages in the supplemental index.
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Rank: Member
Joined: 3/1/2006(UTC)
Posts: 1,142
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The only issue with using the # is that this is processed by the browser and is not sent to the web server as part of the GET request. There is no way for us to get to this information from the code. Here is the spec as per the W3C "Interpretation of the fragment identifier is performed solely by the agent that dereferences a URI; the fragment identifier is not passed to other systems during the process of retrieval. This means that some intermediaries in Web architecture (such as proxies) have no interaction with fragment identifiers and that redirection (in HTTP [RFC2616], for example) does not account for fragments." Here is a link to the spec: http://www.w3.org/TR/webarch/#media-type-fragidIf your SEO guy is recommending this method to other people you might want to point him to this information. |
Justin Etheredge
Senior Software Engineer
BVSoftware |
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