Re: Affiliate programs and link popularity

From: Robert J. Woodhead <trebor_at_animeigo.com>
Date: Wed 15 Dec 1999 08:43:37 -0500

HAVAH HOPE WROTE:
> A lot of search engines are using link popularity as
> one of the factors in ranking web sites. Does anyone
> know if affiliates sites are counted in this figure?

TO WHICH JIM REARDON REPLIED:
> Depends on how your affiliates are linking to you. If
> the links go to your domain directly, such as:
> http://www.ourwebsite.com/affiliates/linkthrough.cgi?wh
> atever

Note that most search engines neither index nor follow
urls with ? or $ arguments in them. Thus such a url
would be useless when it comes to link popularity.

This is one reason why major dynamic content sites (ie:
news.com) use encoded URLs without ? or $ arguments, so
that the search engines will index them.

It is possible with some jiggering to create sites
where, for example,
http://www.ourwebsite.com/affiliates/whatever is
equivalent to
http://www.ourwebsite.com/affiliates/linkthrough.cgi?wh
atever, but even that won't help you much with link
popularity, because link popularity mostly works on the
page level, and all those incoming links would
effectively be to different pages.

Best,R

Robert Woodhead, CEO, AnimEigo http://www.animeigo.com/
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Received on Wed Dec 15 1999 - 07:43:37 CST