You may have been asked this before, but couldn't find any reference to it.
The affiliate user ID can only be used by attaching the ?a=# to any anonymous page on the site. I understand that and it works fine. This thing is that search engines don't exactly look at these favorably. Many affiliate programs allow just using the user number or name rather than the php conventions, i.e. instead of firestarinstitute.com?a=3 they would use firestarinstitute.com/3 or firestarinstitute.com/john or john.firestarinstitute.com.
Actually, most attach the username and I understand you are working on that. Other than using a url service to hide the ?a=, is this a feature that is being addressed. I still don't know php well enough to answer this on my own.
I would like to offer a business card/broshure template to my affiliates, but want them to be able to put a professional looking URL on the advertising and the ?a= just doesn't appear very professional to me. At the same time, I don't really want them using url services, etc as when people quit, it leaves a bunch of abandoned links around for the search engines to play havoc with.
Any advice would be appreciated.
Roger Pearson
Headmaster
Roger,
That is a valid question. Here are my plans:
There really isn't any (reasonable) way to do something like yoursite.com/john or yousite.com/affiliate_name . Subdomains would be possible BUT it would take installing additional modules and setting up your forwarding and dns settings (which, trust me, is a big headache).
What we could do is something like this: yoursite.com/ref/john or yoursite.com/ref/affiliate_name . Of course, the 'ref' in the url could be anything, and I am open to suggestions. Then when users visit this link, it would simply redirect to the home page or possibly a page defined by you in the settings. This would degrade nicely too because even if the user no longer exists, it would still redirect the incoming link to the front page.
This would allow a nicer URL for linking and SEO, but it wouldn't allow the users to link to any page (like yoursite.com/some-page/john). What we could do though is something like this: yoursite.com/ref/john/some-page . This would provide a redirect for the script to go to after recording the affiliate. What do you think about that?
I build my modules around what people need, so your input is important.
Sincerely,
Leighton Whiting