Affilate Links

[CarmenImmobilier]

Hi

I’m looking for confirmation of my worries about affiliate links to a website I'm working for and hopefully get some ideas of how to solve the problem of having affiliates without losing the strength of links from affiliate web sites.

Poplidays.com has an affiliate program with an independant affiliation platform, but it also has a couple of partners who link directly to Poplidays.com from their sites. Poplidays wants to reward the partner sites in the same way as it does affiliates: with a percentage of sales generated by visitors. However as their SEO I don’t want to lose these links. They are from established, quality sites in the same subject area and, in my opinion, have a lot of SEO value.

Affiliate links are 302 redirects from urls on the affiliation platform’s domain; something like http://poplidays.affiliation.com/?clientid=123 to www.poplidays.com

Can you confirm that replacing a direct link to www.poplidays.com with a 302 redirect of this type will be a bad for Poplidays rankings? Any proof of this from a reliable source that I can quote? The affiliation platform is insisting that there is no negative effect and that no one has ever made a remark like mine before.

Any good ideas of how to resolve the problem of rewarding linkers without spoiling the links for SEO? Bearing in mind that Poplidays want to be able to reward sites for visitors who may buy on a later interaction with the site (up to 30-days) and want an automatic report so that the partner can follow his commissions.

I’ve tried implementing something through Google Analytics but it wasn’t perfect.

Your in house affiliation system is working with links like http://go.seomoz.org/aff_c?offer_id=1&aff_id=1624&url_id=1&file_id=24 that 302 to http://www.seomoz.org/features?affid=1624&txnid=10274208218121120514

Is this a better / perfect solution ? Compared to a direct link to http://www.seomoz.org/features ?

Thanks

-          Neil

[KaneJamison]

If you switch a direct link to a 302 redirected link, you're absolutely going to lose the value of that link.

See this 2010 post on SERoundTable about ways to retain that link value and pass affiliate IDs: http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/022446.html - read the comments on the page as well.

As a sidenote, If I recall correctly, I have seen it indicated either officially or unofficially that Google doesn't 'like' the passing of link value through affiliate links - I think they rightfully consider them a form of paid links.