Hiding Affiliate Links
-
Hello,
Currently I'm developing a website that will contain a lot of affiliate links (5000). This is because I'm going to compare the prices of a lot of products. The visitor can go to all websites (my advertisers) that sell these products via affiliate links.
My question is how to hide these affiliate links. I've read lots of solutions, like:
- cloaking,
- rel=nofollow,
- using JavaScript,
- 301 redirects.
I would like to know what the best solution is to deal with these affiliate links for SEO.
Regards,
Martijn
-
What EGOL said and what Sebes said combined. If you want to run your affiliate links through an internal 302 redirect first (so that you can better track click activity) then that is a pretty well established process. You'd want to nofollow those links, of course.
But cloaking? Nope. Don't even think about it.
I recently had an issue where the developers put up a global header nav that used javascript. The JS was in a folder called /js/, which was blocked in the robots.txt file. Within an hour the site was penalized. google still showed the global header nav in their preview so I know they rendered the JS. My guess is after rendering they said, hey wait - the page Chrome/Browser rendered for our preview doesn't look like the page our standard Googlebot sees. They must be cloaking.
Keep it simple and don't try to fool people who are a lot smarter than you. That's what I've learned over the years.
-
Google is pretty good at discovering affiliate links (esp. to the well known networks). But to be sure use rel=nofollow.
Be aware that google is able to render pages with javascript and thus able to see the links and I would never dare to cloak anything
-
Hide them in thick content.
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
-
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 -
Does Canonical Tag passes link juice to the original URL?
We are using Canonical tags at almost all the pages of our eCommerce website. We have various sorting options like "High to Low", "Best Sellers", etc., due to this page URLs get change with some dynamic URL parameters. To avoid duplicity, we are using canonical tag on each page which point to the original url. Also, we are using IBM Coremetrics to track traffic and conversions, but to measure referral traffic in Coremetrics, we have to add tracking parameters in the URL. So, while link building we need to share URLs with Coremetrics tracking parameters in the URL, but the canonical of this page is pointing to the original URL. Suppose we have a Page that needs to be shared with Coremetrics tag: domain.com/category-name/?cm_mmc=Referral_-xyz--izUPF8VmRng--3 This Page has the canonical tag pointing to the original url: domain.com/category-name/ My question is if the URL: domain.com/category-name?cm_mmc=Referral_-xyz--izUPF8VmRng--3 got shared on other websites, will it pass link juice to the original URL: domain.com/category-name.
Affiliate Marketing | | Ramendra.Singh0 -
Affiliate Marketing in Australia
Hello Guys My website is BannerBuzz.com.au I'm Looking for Best Affiliate Marketing Websites In Australia and I've Researched and found the following Websites for the same. http://www.clixgalore.com.au/
Affiliate Marketing | | CommercePundit
http://www.jackmedia.com/
http://www.commissionfactory.com.au/ So I Need your valuable opinions on which website I can get maximum exposure in Affiliate Marketing. Please Suggest. Thanks in Advance. Thanks Prabhakar0 -
Can 302 chains (affiliate links) from "toxic" sources hurt you? Or are you "shielded"?
Hi, I'm going through some affiliate links, which send visitors to our website via a chain of several 302 redirects Some of them are relevant links, others perhaps not so much. I know that Google doesn't pass PageRank on 302s... But are they still considered valid links that pass, let's say, "reputation", "relevance", "link neighbourhood" kind of signals? Otherwise put, is a 302 similar to adding the "nofollow" attribute on a link? Sort of? Not at all? More succinctly put, should I be worried about "toxic" sources separated from us by 302 redirect chains? By the way, yes I recognize that (Google's 302 redirect chain handling aside) associating our brand with perhaps what some might consider spammy websites is not in general a good move; I'm concerned with the technical SEO implications here however. In fact, this technical information may very well help drive decisions/policies on where we allow our affiliate advertising to appear. Thanks 🙂 PS - The affiliate company by the way is cj.com if that helps
Affiliate Marketing | | ntcma0 -
In what ways would an affiliate site be okay with Google?
I know Google has slammed affiliate sites hard. But affiliate marketing can be a real business and had an idea for one, but I would like to know if ALL affiliate sites are looked at as evil in Google's eyes, or if it's just those with thin and duplicate content in the product descriptions. I know they want brands to come up ahead of affiliates of that brand, and that makes sense. If I sold Acme Widgets products, Acme Widgets itself should come up ahead of my site. But what if the site sold widgets in general, with the term widgets not a branded keyword? If all product descriptions are unique and well-written content, on a site that is high quality, would it still be downgraded by Google just because there are affilate links in it? I guess overall the question could be boiled down to, are affiliate sites hit because they have horrible content or because they have links to affiliate programs in them?
Affiliate Marketing | | bizzer0 -
How should I deal with the affiliate URLs we create through our affiliate program?
Our website offers an affiliate program and every affiliate gets a link http://www.ourwebsite.com/?affiliateID. Because we get many such links we use redirects to avoid duplicate content. Unfortunately we have 302 redirects set up and I want to make them 301. Many of our affiliates build backlinks using their http://www.ourwebsite.com/?affiliateID as the URL. If such links were redirected through a 301, would they pass any juice? Can our site get penalized by search engines for having backlinks to URLs that contain affiliate IDs, URLs that are 301 redirected to our homepage lets say?
Affiliate Marketing | | nick.leech0 -
I need some feedback on the value of affiliate aggregators like Link Share
My company decided to start a Link Share affiliate program at the beginning of this year. I've had serious reservations about the value of the program since the beginning but was overruled. Here are my concerns: The majority of publishers seem to be coupon scraper sites or borderline link farms I am told the biggest revenue earners in our network are publishing articles about my company with links back to our site but if they are Google Alerts sure isn't finding them and a manual search hasn't turned up anything either. This makes me think these publishers are using some sort of unsavory way to drive traffic to our site or maybe even cookie traffic that was coming to our site anyway in order to get credit for the sale. Most of all I'd like to hear from anyone else who has used Link Share in the past. Secondly I realize there's not a lot of information here but I'm wondering if this passes the smell test for anyone else. Any feedback would be appreciated.
Affiliate Marketing | | eTundra0 -
Best Way for Resellers to Use Outbound Links to Software Demos
I have a software reseller site that wants to have ever-present linking buttons to demos of the software they sell--the demos are on their software vendor sites. My concerns relate to SEO and leaking link juice; but, also to constantly providing visitors with the exit door. What are the best practices for such a situation?
Affiliate Marketing | | Court_LOQUA0
