Redirecting a subcategory to an external site

It's generally bad practice, ie: considered black hat abuse, to attempt to set cookies for a different site from your own site.

How exactly are they expecting that cookie to ever be set in the first place? Sounds like a bizarre arrangement.

They'll probably have to set up a redirector from their site where you point your customers to davidsons.com?affiliate=dsc&page_to_show=mfg_cat_prod_xyz.html or whatever and then their own site will set the cookie and also redirect the visitor to the final landing page. Makes all the URLs you've already collected useless, and you'll have to rebuild them all again.

Hi DrByte,
I figured that it would be probably considered black hat - but I would ask anyway. Davidsons is not expecting that a cookie be set that way in the first place - I was looking for another way to have the redirect work if their tech people could not figure it out. Yes I agree it would be a bizarre arrangement and not one that I would like to do - Simple works best in most cases.

I had not thought of a redirector on their site. I will have to approach them about that and see what their response will be. I figured the database that i had built is basically useless at this point since it won't do what I want. Your redirect works great and I am most pleased with your work, effort and assistance.

I will send them the request today and see what happens.
Thanks,
David

So far, No Answer back from their tech people and I have done the website a slightly different way to get it up and running. I will let you know if anything else develops.
Thanks, David