I sent my previous article on avoiding link juice loss with affiliates to a friend and he sent me in the direction of linkconnector.com which has something they call “Naked Links” which are basically just links from the affiliate site back to the merchant site directly, with no subdomains or GET parameters. So I started thinking about how to do this, since it seems like an awesome idea. You end up with truly clean links to your merchant index page or even deeper, without any redirections at all.
One way of adding this functionality to your affiliate system (you being the merchant) would be to get your affiliates to register their sites in their affiliate accounts. You can get affiliates to prove that they own a site by getting them to upload a file with specific HTML content or add a CNAME record to their DNS (a la Google Apps for enterprise.) Then when a request comes in your server side script looks at the HTTP_REFERER (yes, spelled incorrectly just like the RFC) and sees which affiliate (if any) should get the cred. Then the script simply sets the variable in a cookie and gives the content with a 200. Affiliate tracking with no IDs or funky links. This method won’t work for cases where the affiliate is doing forum or article marketing, unless the affiliate registers the URL and adds an HTML comment or something to verify. And that won’t work in all cases, such as posting in forums and commenting in blogs – it would be first to post/comment and register their link.
If you wanted to do something like what link connector is doing, the merchant site behaves as a middleman here, sending a request to you to check the referrer URL for which affiliate ID to use. Pretty simple, although fault tolerance should be high on the priority list. The merchant site should not cause a denial-of-service attack against itself by opening too many remote connections.