Canonical versus 301 for affilaite links

[ChristopherGlaeser]

Affiliate links for the Volusion ecommerce shops are of the form mydomain.com/?Click=XX where XX is the affiliate ID.  Volusion uses rel=canonical to redirect the affiliate links to mydomain.com.  Is this a good solution?  I used iDevAffiliate for another online store, and their solution was to use 301 redirects to trip off the ? string.  Comments?

Best,
Christopher

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Rel canonical is never a guaranteed way to redirect traffic. All this is, is just a signal to give Google to suggest that the rel canonical link should be the preferred one. Google can still ignore this if they wish.

For any redirect, you should always use a 301.

Hope this helps,

Andy

[ChristopherGlaeser]

Thanks, Andy, that was my thinking too.  I wanted to confirm before responding to Volusion technical support.  Much appreciated.

Best,
Christopher

[Andy.Drinkwater]

No problems Christopher - glad I could help

Andy