[ic] Spiders and affiliate tracking

[Ed LaFrance]

At 12:32 AM 1/7/2004 +0000, you wrote:
>Rene Hertell wrote:
>
>>Why don't you use the robots.txt file and redirect them to a page the
>>generates a complete index of your products and a url to each product?
>
>I do have a page like you suggest, and I don't have a problem getting my 
>product database crawled, in fact I think every single product we sell is 
>indexed by Google at the moment.
>
>The problem is that in order to track affiliates and PPC advertising, we 
>use URLs like this:
>
>http://oursite.com/?mv_pc=aff1
>
>but these links are somehow getting crawled by certain search engines and 
>we are ending up with affiliate links in Google (and others).
>
>I can't stop the spiders following affiliate links, so I'm just trying to 
>stop them from indexing the page they land on without affecting normal 
>crawling behavoir.

That will be tough. The spiders are probably following these links from the 
affiliate sites and indexing as they go. You might try a [bounce] to a page 
with no args when the landing page is called with an affiliate code, that 
might prevent the index of the mv_pc string - but I am no expert at these 
things, just a suggestions.


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