Inbound Affiliate Links: can this solution help?

[fablau]

Hello everyone,

I have a pretty large e-commerce website and a bunch (about 1,000) affiliates using our in-house affiliate system we built several years ago (about 12 years ago?).

All our affiliates link to us as follows:

http://mywebsite.com/page/?aff=[aff_nickname]

Then our site parses the request, stores a cookie to track the user, then 301 redirects to the clean page URL below:

http://mywebsite.com/page/

Since 2013 we require all affiliates to link to us by using the rel="nofollow" tag to avoid any penalties, but I still see a lot of affiliate links not using the nofollow or old affiliates that have not updated their pages.

So... I was reading on this page from Google, that any possible "scheme" penalization can be fixed by using either the nofollow tag or by using an intermediate page listed on the robots.txt file:

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66356?hl=en

Do you think that could really be a reliable solution to avoid any possible penalization coming from affiliate links not using the "nofollow" tag? I have searched and read around the web but I couldn't find any real answer to my question.

Thanks in advance to anyone.

Best,

Fab.

[davebuts]

Hi Fabrizo,

Yes, blocking affiliate links in robots.txt will eliminate the risk of a penalty.

Adding the following line to your robots.txt will stop your affiliate links being crawled:

Disallow: *?aff=

Cheers,

David

[fablau]

Oh wow, thank you David!

So, if I add the line:

Disallow: *?aff=

I could even get rid of the "intermediate" page I was talking about?

[fablau]

Just wondering if what I have proposed above is feasible...