Canonical Tag and Affiliate Links

[jorgediaz]

Hi!

I am not very familiar with the canonical tag. The thing is that we are getting traffic and links from affiliates. The affiliates links add something like this to the code of our URL:

www.mydomain.com/category/product-page?afl=XXXXXX

At this moment we have almost 2,000 pages indexed with that code at the end of the URL. So they are all duplicated.

My other concern is that I don't know if those affilate links are giving us some link juice or not. I mean, if an original product page has 30 links and the affiliates copies have 15 more... are all those links being counted together by Google? Or are we losing all the juice from the affiliates?

Can I fix all this with the canonical tag?

Thanks!

[adrianvender1]

You can use the canonical URL tag (i.e. rel="canonical") to instruct the search engines what the primary URL should be and avoid any duplicate content issues. You can also setup query parameter exclusions with the different search engine webmaster tools to instruct them to ignore these affiliate query parameters.

Regarding link juice, there is a video from Matt Cutts that suggests that there may a fractional loss of link juice with Canonical URL references, but nothing to be worried about.  So to answer your question, you will still have link juice passed when using the canonical URL tag.

watch?v=zW5UL3lzBOA

[GeorgeDavis]

Hi Jorge,

If I am not mistaken the /product-page would receive link juice for the links with ?afl=XXXXXX at the end.  No need to worry.

[jorgediaz]

But are we losing link juice without using the canonical tags right now?

[GeorgeDavis]

How we help users and webmasters with duplicate content
We've designed algorithms to help prevent duplicate content from negatively affecting webmasters and the user experience.

1. When we detect duplicate content, such as through variations caused by URL parameters, we group the duplicate URLs into one cluster.

2. We select what we think is the "best" URL to represent the cluster in search results.

_3. We then consolidate properties of the URLs in the cluster, such as link popularity, to the representative URL._Consolidating properties from duplicates into one representative URL often provides users with more accurate search results.

If you find you have duplicate content as mentioned above, can you help search engines understand your site?
First, no worries, there are many sites on the web that utilize URL parameters and for valid reasons. But yes, you can help reduce potential problems for search engines by:

1. Removing unnecessary URL parameters -- keep the URL as clean as possible.

2. Submitting a Sitemap with the canonical (i.e. representative) version of each URL. While we can't guarantee that our algorithms will display the Sitemap's URL in search results, it's helpful to indicate the canonical preference.

Source

[KT684]

Hey Jorgediaz, first off I think it would be wise to add the canonical tags specifying the primary URL for all of your pages, additionally it wouldn't hurt to add the parameter in question to your Google webmasters tool letting Google know to ignore your affiliate parameters.  You can find that in the Site Configuration settings under the 'parameter handling' tab.

I personally woudln't worry too much about the 'loss of link juice' since I think what Matt Cutts is talking about is more duplicate content that results from shopping carts that might serve up a very similar page based on a filter (such as re-ordering products by price).  In my experience affiliate links aren't the greatest in the first place, many are probably even using your publisher ID sending the link to an intermediary source for tracking purposes, so to recap, if it were me I'd add the canonical, add the parameter in your webmaster tools and leave it at that.

Hope this helps.