Hi everybody I found the following discussion about affiliate links and was wondering what our dearest Alex and everybody else's comments are: http://www.webproworld.com/viewtopic.php?t=70739 In short, the discussion is about what the search engines think about affiliate links like the ones used by aMember: If you have links to your site like example.com/go.php?r=1 and example.com/go.php?r=2 etc, will the search engines apply duplicate content penalties. Does anybody have any experience with this? Did your site drop its rankings as a result? Any other comments? Cheers John (a aMember lover)
There's actually no such thing as a duplicate content penalty. The engines will simply choose to show only one instance of the URL. However, it would still be a good idea to block the duplicate URLs via your robots.txt file.
I agree, there is NO penalty for any links to your website (even from doorways). Else it would be easy to abuse any website in the net, just by setting up "bad" links to it.
By inserting the following line in your robots.txt file: Disallow: /amember/go.php (Adjust "/amember/" to the correct path from your homepage to the amember folder on your site) Anybody, please correct me if I am wrong. John