Will giving a blogger an affiliate url to my site reduce her links' seo value to me?

[Brocberry]

If a blogger were to write a post about one of my products and link to my product page, would giving her an affiliate url to link to rather than the normal link spoil the seo value of the link?

So instead of

mysite.com/product-one

it would be

mysite.com/affiliate/blogger/product-one

Google would think... this is a transaction not a vote of confidence?

[SEODinosaur]

As long as the link has a "DO Follow" attribute it will pass link juice. If you do not want to pass link juice use the "no follow" attribute. In other words. However usually affiliate links do not pass the link juice only direct.

[Brocberry]

Hey Donnie. What if it has neither attribute?

[SEODinosaur]

Then it is a followed link and will pass the link juice.

[rango]

They will still pass juice, but they will pass it to the wrong page - namely the one with the affiliate id in it. And then, you might even get a situation where that page ends up ranking in the search engines over your own. The affiliate will certainly be happy with that of course, but you probably won't be

A workaround would be to 301 redirect the user as soon as you've recorded the affiliate and they've hit that page. It's slightly less valuable than a direct link to mysite.com/product-one but it's better than a link to the affiliate page.

[Brocberry]

Thanks rango

I think you're right.

It's a strange one, though, they have a new URL but I wonder if they treat it as duplicate content?