SEO

What is the best way to track affiliates? At the moment I am just using a GET variable which can't be good for SEO.

All affiliate programs use a referral URL (passing the ID via GET), and then tracking the sale with cookies and/or IP logs (or sometimes promo codes entered during checkout).

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Joe Ward / Crawlability Inc.
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In my line of work (ecomemrce) this is a huge problem.

Most of the time, we set up landing pages.


ie, we give the links as:
site.com/offer/source/
which re-writes to affiliate.aspx
affiliate.aspx sets the cookies, etc, then does a 301 redirect back to the intended content.

Bot's see it as a 301 to the real link, and the user still gets the cookie.

So google has no problem with Cookie + 301?
Could the same thing be applied to a ?r=user without rewriting the URL, in regards to SEO? For existing links. Obviously they won't update as fast.
I'll do a rewrite script for new links.