By Kenneth Koh
If you run your own affiliate program, and also build traffic from search engine, today’s tip will be very useful to you. Most affiliate links look something like this:
www.yourProgram.com?r=referid
With a good affiliate program, you can easily get hundreds or thousands of websites linking to your homepage through the customized affiliate links.
Does it mean you have hundreds or thousands of backlinks pointing to your homepage? Sad to say, NO!
Search engines treat www.yourProgram.com?r=referid as a new url that is different from www.yourProgram.com. So when someone links to www.yourProgram.com?r=referid, it is as good as linking to another url on your website. That link will not count as a backlink to your homepage.
Fortunately, there is a simple trick to overcome this problem. It’s by using 301 redirect.
301 redirect means “permanently moved”. When you add 301 redirect on www.yourProgram.com?r=referid, pointing it to www.yourProgram.com, you are telling the search spiders that the referral url has permanently moved to your homepage.
301 redirect is search engine friendly. The search engines understand that since a url is permanently moved to another url, all the links on the former url should now belong to the new url.
How To Create 301 Redirect?
This is a technical question and I will not go into the details. There are many technical blogs and forums on the net where you can get the details. In this article, I’ll just show you what I use for my own websites. It’s a simple PHP script that I add to the index.php file of my websites.
<?
if ($r <> “”) {
header( “HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently” );
header(”Location: http://www.yourProgram.com”);
exit();
}
?>
This script simply says if ?r=[someReferID] exist, i.e. if it’s an affiliate link, add 301 Redirect on that page and redirect it to your homepage.
With this code, the search engine will ignore the referral url and credit all the backlinks to your homepage.
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