Hi,

A website I look after is able to provide discounts to affinity partners on products we sell. When a user lands on our site as a referral from one of these affinity partners, we use a URL parameter 'afid' to recognise the partner and brand and discount our sites products accordingly.

Once the user hits the site and the affinity partner ID is recognised and stored in the users session, I do a redirect back to the same url (usually just the homepage) without the afid parameter. This is done largely just to tidy up the URL.

Now, I currently do this as 302 redirect, but a SEO agency working on behalf of my client has suggested this should be a 301 redirect. I'm not convinced however, because as I understand it, if I use a 301 redirect then I'm saying to the client always you the URL without the afid parameter in the future, which would cause me to not recognise them as an affinity partner.

Just to be clear, I'm redirecting from www.example.com/?afid=abc to www.example.com.

All I want to do is say 'yep that url is fine, i recognise you as an affinity partner and have tagged your session accordingly, now here's a tidier url for you to view my site from'.

Does anyone have any advice on the correct response code for the redirect in this case?

:wq
G

Either will do equally well.

HOWEVER what the "SEO agency" is saying is essentially correct but I would suspect they are suggesting it for the wrong reaons.

Sending a 302 response will keep the affiliate ID URI in the SEs index, this could possibly mean that the affiliate ID may be shown in SE results and that could mean affiliates being credited with a visitor incorrectly.
A 301 response will not have this potential problem.

Definitely do the 301.. If you do, then google will count that affiliate link towards the main top level domain instead of the affiliate page. This is a great way to make sure that every single affiliate link is helping even if no one is ordering from it.

Matter of fact, you should be using 301's to redirect non-www to www or which ever url scheme you've chosen so that all links count towards the correct domains.