Important question on affiliate links
-
The website I am working on is http://www.treadmillreviews.com. If you look at any of our affiliate links, they all have an href value of # or something that keeps the user on the page. However, there is an onclick="window.open('affiliate link URL')" code in them that has the affiliate link open in a new window.
This website was set up to "hide" the affiliate links in essence this way. I just tried to make a PPC campaign in Google. Got shut down in about 20 minutes for being a "bridge page."
Now, all of the content is original and not copied from anywhere. Supposedly Google could not see these links. Yet we got labeled how we did, and now I"m thinking it is causing rankings to hurt a bit.
My question is, should I change how all of the links are set up? Should I make the href value be the affiliate link? It is a redirect like CJ.com uses. Should I nofollow those affiliate links? What is the best way to handle this problem? All help is appreciated.
-
Here's my opinion;
Google's spiders will have more difficulty interpreting and following affiliate links using the onclick="window.open... method, but that doesn't mean that they can't. To my knowledge they can follow these links and even pass juice between them. Although I'm not sure that it would affect your rankings and so whether changing the links would do anything; after all, they're outbound links. If you were to nofollow them, then you would still loose the same amount of link juice, it just wouldn't flow to the trading sites.
On a separate note, as you know; Google's problem seems to be that you're acting as a 'middle man' from the sites who are actually selling the treadmills. From the odd story I've heard, unless your site is bringing something 'unique' to the equation then they don't like to have it promoted in their advertising space, they prefer to have the actual seller paying for the advertising. One way I've heard to get around this is to have a PPC specific landing page that concentrates purely on the review side of things, however I'm not sure whether your site would be flagged by them now or not.
-
Yeah I hear that, in spite of the site owner thinking the affiliate links were hidden from Google so that they didn't look like affiliate links, we still got the shaft anyway.
My question then is in the post-panda world, since Google recognizes us as an affiliate site, are we getting hurt organically for that? Should we nofollow the links? Change them from javascript?
-
Hey, I read about this somewhere previously and Google has a policy of no PPC for what it considers Bridge Pages:
From: https://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=46675
Bridge pages: Pages that act as an intermediary, whose sole purpose is to link or redirect traffic to the parent company
Had a bit of a dig and this was the post I read a while back, sure of it:
http://www.curtsnow.com/googles-bridge-page-policy-dont-ask-dont-tell/
Hope that helps buddy.
Marcus
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Spent months creating links but Webmasters not picking it up
Hey Guys, I've been working on Blast My Deals.com an affiliate site which i have an issue hoping you guys can help with. For the past year and a half we created loads of links from multiple domains at-least over 700+ which Webmasters did pick up since then we've created even more links however when we go in to our Search Console "Links to your site" it shows 214 domains. It seems like our old links are being removed and our new links aren't being added. All the links we created have an average of DA40+ For the past 2 weeks ive noticed a significant drop in organic traffic and loosing our positions on our main keywords. Our DA has also dropped from 33 to 29 in a matter of 2 weeks. I checked everything including robots.txt, sitemap.xml but Im unable to find the reason for it.
Affiliate Marketing | | kazirahman0 -
How do I easily no-follow my affiliate links?
Hi, I am in the process of setting up an affiliate marketing campaign for my site. I have done a bit of research and understand that it is safest in terms of SEO to add no-follow to the links from the affiliate sites. What is the easiest and simplest way to implement this?
Affiliate Marketing | | whiteonlySEO2 -
Advise about Social Sharing between two loosely affiliated website - (retweets/fb cross sharing)
So basically, I have two websites. One being my Primary website and another which is very Niche/Seasonal. Now the Niche website received a penalty, and was later re-included however google traffic has been extremely limited since being reindexed. (bing never had a problem, still top ranked) I don't directly link back and forth between the two websites because its not worth hurting my primary websites ranking. I'm sure google knows I own both anyway, as they are on the same webmaster tools but the Niche site was kicked for spammy link building & its been an endless process removing them all. Anyway, with that being my concern. Would it be acceptable to cross share facebook posts, retweet and do things like that on occasion? My primary reason for asking is because the Niche website has a very large social following, so I would like to share post/tweets from my Primary site when its relevant and vice versa. Appreciate any suggestions/comments. Thanks!
Affiliate Marketing | | Southbay_Carnivorous_Plants0 -
How to prevent affiliates from bringing negative SEO?
Hi there, I'm just about to integrate iDevAffiliate network for one of my sites, however it occurred to me that affiliates may (unfortunately) resort to black hat methods without me becoming aware of it, which could pass negative link juice to my site. Is there any way to use affiliate networks such as iDev without causing this problem? I was thinking of simply using a different URL, but the problem is that 301 redirects won't mitigate the issue. Thanks!
Affiliate Marketing | | freeunlocks0 -
Recommended affiliate programmes (particularly UK-based)?
I'm starting a photography/travel/music blog and thought it might be a good idea to stick the occasional affiliate link in when it's appropriate. Does anyone have any recommendations? The related items would mainly be to DVDs, books and music, and sometimes something more travel specific like flights. Are the programmes from the likes of Amazon and ebay good, or would it be better to sign up to a system that covers many companies? It'll be my own CMS if that makes any difference. Thanks. 🙂
Affiliate Marketing | | Alex-Harford0 -
Limit of links in the same page
Hi, I have some pages that have more than 100 links. They are links to some stores (affiliate links). I set all of them as rel="nofollow" but I think Google is penalizing me because the link quantity. What is a good number of URL in the same page? Thanks
Affiliate Marketing | | GDB0 -
Gaining juice from affiliate links
Afternoon Mozzers, We run a basic affiliate program whereby we distribute banners and tools to affiliate sites who then link back to our homepage via these, often through a tool that incorporates an HTML link with our primary keyword term embedded. This banner/tool/link heads to our homepage, and will then incorporate that particular affiliate's unique code in the URL, eg. www.example.com/1A-265-GNH Seems pretty standard practice so far? So, considering this, that we include our primary keyword term in HTML in some banners, some also link to our homepage via an embedded image (and others then just work off cookies as per usual), can anyone hazard a guess, or know for certain, the beneficence of this as a link building means? I ask in terms of trying to determine whether to continue punting our tools and banners as a decent link building opportunity, or concentrate more on other link building means. Hope I've been clear enough, but am happy to elaborate if need be. Cheers
Affiliate Marketing | | Martin_S0 -
How to use different affiliate link based on geolocalisation in a Seo friendly way ?
Hi All, My website Sportytrader.com http://www.sportytrader.com/ works as an sport betting affiliate website on the french language markets. With sport betting legalisation in Europe, only people from France can play on french sport betting website. The same for Belgium or swiss. We have traffic from everywhere. So we need to geolocalize all our affiliate links to provide the right affiliate link to the right person in function of his location? What is the best way and the more seo friendly way to do that? Thanks a lot, Renaud
Affiliate Marketing | | jarnac0