Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thanks, Ryan.

Great link, too.

Afternoon Mozzers,

We run a basic affiliate program whereby we distribute banners and tools to affiliate sites who then link back to our homepage via these, often through a tool that incorporates an HTML link with our primary keyword term embedded. This banner/tool/link heads to our homepage, and will then incorporate that particular affiliate's unique code in the URL, eg. www.example.com/1A-265-GNH

Seems pretty standard practice so far?

So, considering this, that we include our primary keyword term in HTML in some banners, some also link to our homepage via an embedded image (and others then just work off cookies as per usual), can anyone hazard a guess, or know for certain, the beneficence of this as a link building means?

I ask in terms of trying to determine whether to continue punting our tools and banners as a decent link building opportunity, or concentrate more on other link building means.

Hope I've been clear enough, but am happy to elaborate if need be.

Cheers

As I painfully learnt this past weekend, you may want to get going pretty slowly on it. I went a bit nuts, within 80 - 100 of our archived articles pages (only inserting one link per page), with about 7-8 different terms to the appropriate pages and got heavily punished for those terms.

Long story short, be very wary of what you read on the matter.

The developer now claims that including a mon_page attribute (1&mon_page=1) within the URL will let Google know how our archiving system works and, thus, prevent us from being penalised for duplications. Any help is greatly appreciated. Trouble finding info on this.

We have a pagination issue, which the developers seem reluctant (or incapable) to fix whereby we have 3 of the same page (slightly differing URLs) coming up in different pages in the archived article index. The indexing convention was very poorly thought up by the developers and has left us with the same article on, for example, page 1, 2 and 3 of the article index, hence the duplications.

Is this a clear cut case of using a canonical tag? Quite concerned this is going to have a negative impact on ranking, of course.

Cheers

Martin