Hi

I am about to launch a major referral scheme, obviously to get more members, but as a bonus increase my inbound links.

If there a buttons/banners/textlinks across the internet with links to, for example:

http://www.mysite.com/referrer/?id=63

, would many of these increase the PR of mysite.com?

I don't believe so. Infact, it can hurt it. My site's affiliate program has many people linking to the same page, with different ID numbers (ex: ...page.asp?affid=342). Google indexes them all as seperate pages, but with the same content. This page's PR fell from a 5 to a 3 over the last update. All of my other pages went up or stayed the same.. I added a redirect script so the ID would disapear after the page loads and this didn't help. G still indexes them as seperate pages.

If anyone has a possible solution, please let us know.

Ive found a simple solution to this, change the page for every referal add the users name into all refering pages, i.e

description of site and headings Brought to you by {Username}

And changing a lot of content based on the user
If that doesnt work use subdomains

If you need help add me on msn harro[AT]harr0.com

Yes, that sounds like it would definately work, but when you're doing a large scale referral scheme isn't really ideal to create individual pages for each referrer.

Hmm.

They may see the pages as the same if you are only changing one word...You should allow affiliates to add perhaps a description about themself.

Doesn't sound to easy. Is there anything I can use to automatically generate a sort of... referral page that can count towards PR?

Time to go back to google...

Maybe you should host your affiliate program on a different domain...