It is clear to me now.

At the moment, I changed the redirect to 302 and blocked the /ads/ folder on the robots.txt. But I will surely proceed setting up a new domain for the affiliate traffic.

Thanks,

Hello,

1. I will add the nofollow rel to our affiliate links, but this will only solve part of the problem. Many just grab the URL and build their own links.

2. You mean when someone hits site.com/ads/, gets redirected to subdomain.site.com and than to my main site.com? 301 redirects won't transfer the page rank to the page they are redirecting to?

What about changing the status code from 301 to 302 when redirecting from site.com/ads/ to site.com? Will this transfer the page rank? Any other status code that seems more suitable in this situation, like see other (303)?

Hello,

I got an affiliate program on my website, that redirects the affiliate link to the main site like:

site.com/ads/aff_code/  ->  site.com/ (The redirect is done using a 301 status code.)

On the redirect process the site stores a cookie to track the affiliate sale.

• Will Google and others SE follow this permanent redirect, transferring the relevance of this affiliate link to my main site? In other words, if an affiliate does something wrong (like spams), does the bad reputation will be transferred to my main site?
• Is there a better way to do that from a SEO standpoint?

Thanks,