Indexing affiliate links

Question

PHP

Hello.

We decided to create an affiliate program for an online store.
The bottom line is that the partner places a link in which his identifier is transmitted, and when buying a product using this link, the partner receives a part of the profit. The

question is how to properly process a link in an online store so that the search engine does not consider multiple pages, for example:
example.com/good1/ref1/
example.com/good1/ref2/
and the page is actually one:
example.com/good1/

close links from indexing, but in this case, will I lose the weight of external links?
Any ideas on how to do the right thing so that you don’t lose weight and don’t multiply pages?

Answer 1

Use the meta tag />
It tells search engines that, in your case, the pages
example.com/good1/ref1/
example.com/good1/ref2/
are copies of
example.com/good1/
This way you will definitely not lose weight and you you don’t have to cunningly configure the store to work out 301 redirects.
I also strongly recommend checking if the referral page is open in an iframe, since unscrupulous partners often stupidly put an iframe with a ref link on their site, a ref cookie is set on your part, and even if the user subsequently came to your site not through a ref link, "partner » the sale counts.

Answer 2

You can do a 301 redirect from example.com/good1/ref1/ to example.com/good1/
Then the link weight should be preserved.
At least in affiliate programs in which we participate, they do just that.

Answer 3

You can use standard methods like the parameter in the link ?refId=4 or the hash #ref10, which can then be written on the client side with a simple JS script

Answer 4

Either disable the indexing of these pages, or a subsequent 301 redirect after processing the data.
With JS, I would not recommend bothering, you can lose information about some of the transitions.

Answer 5

Add
Disallow: /*/ref to robots.txt
This is the easiest way.
You can still get confused with the Clean-param directive , but only Yandex understands it.

Answer 6

If there is no external tracking system, then just put a 301 redirect from all links of the ref1 type to the product card. This will solve the problem of transferring the reference mass to the main card. And disable indexing via robots.txt as Phelix advised. But in general, go for parameters in the URL or tracking on the server side.