Affiliate URLs Indexed in Google

[ATIseo]

We have an active in-house affiliate program which has a create-a-link function where affiliate, as in most affiliate programs, can build links back to our content to produce sales.

The problem that I am seeing is that some of the affiliate URL versions are being indexed in Google rather than the original page. For instance..

http://www.ourdomain.com/page_start.aspx?affnum=F025212&Start_Page=RaceCar&referrer=createlink

is outranking...

http://www.ourdomain.com/racecar

This presents 2 issues for us. First, this presents duplicate content issues obviously. Second, we pay our affiliates a portion of the sales so, in order to maximize profitability, we'd like the indexed pages to be the original version.

What's the best way to handle this? I want to make sure that affiliates continue to get credit for links from their sites but search engine links should go to the original versions.

[TomRayner]

Hi there

Assuming that the affiliate URL points to the same page (http://www.ourdomain.com/racecar), so there is only one page that exists, then adding a rel=canonical tag should fix this problem.

On the http://www.ourdomain.com/racecarpage, add this code to the tag:

rel="canonical" href="http://www.ourdomain.com/racecar" />

This will tell Google that any other versions of this page should not exist and that the http://www.ourdomain.com/racecar page is the original that should be ranked.  It is considered a strong signal (not a rule) by Google, but I've very rarely seen it not work.

Now, if the affiliate URL actually goes to a duplicate version of the page (so there are 2 pages), I would simply add some meta data to tell Google not to index the page.  You can do that with this in your page's code:

Hope this helps to answer your question.

[jws8118]

You should setup rel=canonical tags to be automatically added to each of the affiliate pages that are duplicates of your main page.  This basically tells Google that your original URL without affiliate parameters is the authoritative version of the content and that all other pages should not be indexed above the canonical version.

You should also probably add a query string to tell Google Webmaster Tools to ignore URL's that contain your affiliate query parameter.  This will make sure that Webmaster Tools is setup correctly so you aren't getting hit for duplicate content.

Hope this helps!

[Mark_Ginsberg]

I agree with Tom wholeheartedly

[OrionGroup]

I would suggest at least adding those variables in your Google Webmaster Tools account to help Google understand which query strings have an impact on changing content on a page versus the variables that are only associated with affiliates.

In GWT, go to "Configuration" in the left menu, then "URL Parameters"

Scott

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[ATIseo]

Thanks so much for the responses, guys. You've reaffirmed my suspicions. Someone had suggested using a 301 but I believe that method could potentially interfere with the affiliate tracking.