Google indexing items with Affiliate ID's in URL

[bhill]

We have about 17 legitimate affiliates in our store and I just noticed that their links (with appended AFID's) are all over google search results in some cases higher than our own. This is disturbing because affiliates are falsely linked to customer sales. We also use a google site search in the store which is amazing and the results are also displaying the links with afid's.
What would be the appropriate way for the store to check the referring url and ignore either all or part of the url (the af id) if coming from google? Surely someone has been through this?
Thnx

mises.org/store ( if you want to see the google site search )

[kastnerd]

you could somehow block google from listing those urls using robots

[jmestep]

It's really strange- I was checking in my Google Sitemap account and they had listed that I had duplicate URLs for search pages, which is understandable. But I've got robots blocked from Search.aspx!

[AbleMods]

It's really strange- I was checking in my Google Sitemap account and they had listed that I had duplicate URLs for search pages, which is understandable. But I've got robots blocked from Search.aspx!

AdvancedSearch must be blocked too unless you've removed all references to it from your site.

Plus, depending on the categorygridpage control used for each category, you could wind up with some strange results due to how different categorygridpage controls render product URLs differently. Some click-throughs result in the category embedded in the URL, some do not. I think. I'll have to test that again on my site.

[bhill]

I created a new topic under Features category here:
viewtopic.php?f=45&t=9515&start=0

[kastnerd]

Maybe this would work in your robots.txt

Pattern matching

Googlebot (but not all search engines) respects some pattern matching.

* To match a sequence of characters, use an asterisk (*). For instance, to block access to all subdirectories that begin with private:

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /private*/

* To block access to all URLs that include a question mark (?) (more specifically, any URL that begins with your domain name, followed by any string, followed by a question mark, followed by any string):

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /*?

http://www.google.com/support/webmaster ... swer=40360

If you use disallow/*affiliateid or something like that