Credit for our affiliate program

[melliott]

Here's my situation: we have an affiliate and linking program whereby we give everyone an affiliate ID (for tracking purposes) that tags on to the end of our URL *****www.mattsite.com/12023*****. This ID is on the end of every page that you would normally see by coming straight to our site. The problem is the search engines view each of these affiliate IDs as a different page and thus don't give our domain home page (or any other page) any credit for linking to us. We have some pretty powerful partners that could give our site a higher level of relevence if their links weren't set up this way.

What is the best way to work around this? I've thought we could set up the affiliate ID as a parameter *****www.mattsite.com/?source=12023***** so we can still track the affiliate number, but I believe we would run into the same problem.

Any ideas?

[Marcia]

melliott, assuming the domain you've given us is the actual domain, what exactly would the links give you relevance for? Looking for what Google refers to as "signals of quality" those pages like they're nothing more than a link to elsewhere. Is there something more, something we're not seeing?

Actually, I'm quite curious as to the source of the traffic your "high-powered affiliates" are sending to you.

[melliott]

This is not the actual domain. We rank quite well for our first tier words/phrases and for our second tier as well. I would just like to see us get more back link credit for this affiliate program we have set up. All of our affiliates have a good degree of relevency to our site and we have someone who manages this.

I think we have a pretty unique affiliate program setup we built that just might be hindering SEO a bit. So I was wondering if anyone else has run into this.

[bhartzer]

The problem is the search engines view each of these affiliate IDs as a different page and thus don't give our domain home page (or any other page) any credit for linking to us.
Yes, that's exactly how the engines see it--each is a diffferent page. However, you can fix that by setting up 301 Permanent Redirects. When the engines visit those URLs they should get redirected to the main page of your site.