My website is promoted by users displaying their own custom referral
address. Here is an example:

http://www.oil-testimonials.com/?source=629
http://www.oil-testimonials.com/?source=110

I've learned the hard way that google and other search engines treat
these as two separate pages. So instead of having my PR go higher by
having all of these referral links, it has actually ruined my PR.

I still have to support these referral URLs somehow, however, because
it's an incentive for my website visitors. It helps promote their own
essential oil businesses. So I need to come up with a plan on how to
deal with this.

Should I keep the current system and modify my header.php file to grab
the source number, store it into a session variable and then do a 301
redirect to www.oil-testimonials.com? This would allow my website to
"know" who referred the website visitor, but it should also help google
treat all of these inbound referral links as the same index.php page.
Is there a better way to do this?

Thanks!

<web@recordaudio.net> wrote in message
news:1143399565.759468.104640@e56g2000cwe.googlegr oups.com...
I looked at your main keyphrase competitors and their PR values are in this
web site's league, not that it matters much in this case. They have a few
more BackLinks than you, maybe request some nicely from relevant web sites.

These "testimonials" look OK to me. Try changing your "Home" anchor to
somethoing more keyphrase rich, you know like " Home of Aroma Therapy" or
something like that. If you create a page, make sure it works to your
overall SEO advantage as well as bringing credibilty to your product.

--
Fred
http://www.rezultz-web-site-promotion.com/
( ethical SEO issues and basic search engine marketing stuff )
http://canadian-web-site-promotion.blogspot.com/
( please feel free to flame me here too )

Thanks for the tips, however, you didn't address my question. Should I
use a 301 redirect on all of these referral URLs so that google will
index them as one page?

Thanks.

<web@recordaudio.net> wrote in message
news:1143420348.031000.205050@i39g2000cwa.googlegr oups.com...

I purposely avoided discussing it. I don't like redirects too much. There
are some times when a redirect could be a justified alternative, but I'm not
sure about this case. Maybe someone else with more experience in that kind
of thing will help you out with that.


--
Fred
http://www.rezultz-web-site-promotion.com/
( ethical SEO issues and basic search engine marketing stuff )
http://canadian-web-site-promotion.blogspot.com/
( please feel free to flame me here too )

canadafred wrote:

The number of referral links (the real ones, not links copy&pasted elsewhere
that happen to contain the referral ID) is probably small compared to other
links and doesn't account for much PR.
If you add redirects (only for referral links of course) some PR may be lost
(depending on how SE handle these), but the total inbound link count is
bundled on one page - instead of being spread over many different pages.
The loss (if any) should be much smaller than the gain.

Storing the referral ID in a session var also opens some more possibilities.
E.g. the 'referral text' (or a smaller version) on all pages, ...

--
Benjamin Niemann
Email: pink at odahoda dot de
WWW: http://pink.odahoda.de/