How much link juice passes through urls with affiliate id's?
-
hi
we can get a valuable link with the desired anchor text from a news site. the destination url would be something like www.site.com/product. but in order to track conversions, our sales team would like to add an affiliate id to the url, so that it would look like this: www.site.com/product?sess_affiliate=ta
how much link juice would a link to this affiliate url pass? would we be shooting our wad by linking to the ?sess-URL instead of the original URL?
-
hi blurbpoint
wow, thanks for your in-depth thoughts about this and the helpful references. So it seems that adding parameters to the linked-to url will be a signal that the link is paid for? Makes sense.
Only one thing I didn't understand: what do you mean by "saving the website's image while leaving some link juice"?
I didn't quite get that... -
Yes off course it devalues the passed link juice by adding parameters. But it is always a good idea to add parameters. As many times I had seen the cases that Google sees the affiliate links as a paid links which results in the big drop in rankings. That the reason the idea of using link parameters for affiliate program works well.
Google sees affiliate links as a paid links and you know what it means.Thanks to link parameters or affiliate URL's which saves our main URL's to get participate into bad neighborhood.
And its always good to save website's image while leaving link juice.
Mattcutts once stated Typically, we want to handle those sorts of links appropriately. A lot of the time, that means that the link is essentially driving people for money, so we usually would not count those as an endorsement. in an interview with Eric Enge.
And in 2008 in SMX Google and Yahoo agreed that they will pass a link juice from good affiliate networks.
Read this point from Rand's post.
Affiliate Links
Shockingly, when asked point blank if affiliate programs that employed juice-passing links (those not using nofollow) were against guidelines or if they would be discounted, the engineers all agreed with the position taken by Sean Suchter of Yahoo!. He said, in no uncertain terms, that if affiliate links came from valuable, relevant, trust-worthy sources - bloggers endorsing a product, affiliates of high quality, etc. - they would be counted in link algorithms. Aaron from Google and Nathan from Microsoft both agreed that good affiliate links would be counted by their engines and that it was not necessary to mark these with a nofollow or other method of blocking link value.But note the point they had not mentioned what will they do with low quality links.
From the above points it clear that Google will passes a link juice. But still many of us in affiliate industry uses a parameters and redirects in affiliate urls. Reason is just simple not all the affiliate are as genuine or reputed as Amazon. So if your links in 50 sites and may be 40 site can be those which Google does not like so links from those site may harm your site.
So as I said above its always good to save website's image while leaving some link juice.
-
thanks for your thoughts guys. but i think you misunderstood the question. In both cases, the external site is linking to our own site. the page linked-to is the same one. but the question is, if it devalues the passed link juice if we add the parameters ?sess_affiliate=ta to the link we get.
-
I have a pitch/sales page that has a PR of 2, mozRank of 4.17 and a moz page authority of 38. Not great numbers but considering its a sales page probably not bad. I don't have a lot of affiliates because the niche is quite small. People that want to move to the Philippians and live the expat life in the Philippines.
Based on this, I'd have to say that I'm getting link juice from affiliates. Most of the sites linking to me are PR0 or PR1 and Moz Rank is showing only root domains linking to the site. The site/page is a two page site and about a year old.
-
Hi,
I don't believe that link juice will be affected - if the link is followed by search engines. But maybe you should put these links in nofollow : because linking to one only site or to a few site is not really natural, and also because the affiliate is in a way your competitor in the Serps.
What do you think about it ?
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 -
Affiliate program links
Hello, I've question regarding affiliate partner generated links.Company www.example.com has a affiliate program. Partner www.example2.com links to the company site with affiliate link www.example.com/?affid=xxxx in banner, article etc. As I understand these type of links could hurt our Company site, so I asked partners to use rel="nofollow" in all links where they link to us usign ?affid=xxxx in url. To be 100% sure that I did the right thing I decided to post here my question. Could these type of links hurt our Company site? Regards,
Affiliate Marketing | | juris_l
Juris0 -
Issues with centrally hosting your own affiliate links?
Can anyone see any issues centralising affiliate links across a network? Example - many of us would use some kind of redirect from our sites like abc.com/go/afflink1
Affiliate Marketing | | RaceMedia
bcd.com/go/afflink1 using either htaccess, php or javascript to redirect to the affiliate site But as your network of site grows - to change a link involves visiting 40 sites to change each of the files in the "go" folders. Would there be any net effect from using an otherwise vacant domain to host the links - so they only need to be changed in one place? Example
abc/go/afflink1 links to afflinks.com/1 which then redirects to affiliate site
bcd/go/afflink1 links to afflinks.com/1 which then redirects to affiliate site So all your links across the network for afflink1 would point to your afflinks.com/1 Any changes only require changes to one file afflinks.com/1 Assuming there is nothing else on afflinks.com - would there be any issues? Assume all links no followed and afflinks.com noindex. AND.... our redirects have been in place for some years using javascript,php or .htaccess. What is the current best practice for redirecting affiliate links?0 -
Links from Blogs and Forums
Hello Everyone, We are a small, local business in a city in Canada. We just got a new website and I am responsible for basically all of it, including the SEO. I was researching the back-links from our top-ranking competitor (another small, local business in our city). Here is their ranking: PA 40, with 441 Links from 111 RDs DA 30, with 6,864 Links from 116 RDs Here is the second-highest guy: PA 29, with 101 Links from 10 RDs DA 15, with 1,682 Links from 11 RDs As you can see, the top-ranking competitor's PA & DA are just about double his closest competitor. (Don't ask where we currently stand!) But, on closer examination, most of the links from our top-ranking competitor come from a local blog, where our competitor's ad appears in an advertisement on the sidebar. Each time they make a post, which is just about every day, our competitor gets a link. They also have a lot of links from a forum on a rock band's website. The original post was something about finding music, but the responses all have links to unrelated websites. This seems really, really slimy to me. What's going on?
Affiliate Marketing | | StillLearning0 -
Affiliate URLs Indexed in Google
We have an active in-house affiliate program which has a create-a-link function where affiliate, as in most affiliate programs, can build links back to our content to produce sales. The problem that I am seeing is that some of the affiliate URL versions are being indexed in Google rather than the original page. For instance.. http://www.ourdomain.com/page_start.aspx?affnum=F025212&Start_Page=RaceCar&referrer=createlink is outranking... http://www.ourdomain.com/racecar This presents 2 issues for us. First, this presents duplicate content issues obviously. Second, we pay our affiliates a portion of the sales so, in order to maximize profitability, we'd like the indexed pages to be the original version. What's the best way to handle this? I want to make sure that affiliates continue to get credit for links from their sites but search engine links should go to the original versions.
Affiliate Marketing | | ATIseo0 -
Looking for a nice way to add an amazon affiliate store to my site
We are often asked what our favorite toys, books, resources, etc, are and I want to make a page(s) with our top resources that is a nice clean amazon affiliate store. Are there are good resources anyone knows of to do this? (I'm using a wordpress blog by the way....perhaps there is a plug in?) Thanks.
Affiliate Marketing | | NoahsDad0 -
Link juice from my affiliates to my site
I'm setting up an affiliate program through 1shoppingcart. Even though I run 3 different websites, the way their program works is that I have to have 1 domain name that my affiliates get as their affiliate link, with their unique id attached at the end. I can give them multiple links that will redirect to various places on my 3 websites, but those original links that they put on their site will all be to just 1 domain. I'm wondering if I still get link juice to my sites even though the links are obviously being redirected? Does it depend on the redirection method? I was just thinking that getting hundreds of affiliates who run related sites could be a very good seo boost if they're all linking to my site, but I feel like it's going to be wasted because of this redirection thing. Hope this made sense. Thanks very much,
Affiliate Marketing | | philraymond
Phil0 -
Passing Google Analytics Variables Through Javascript?
Alright so here's my situation and hopefully someone can help... I want to be able to pass Google Analytics variables onto my affiliate links so I have some better conversion tracking data (not PPC traffic so no easy dynamic keyword insertion variables). I want to do something like this: User searches "keyword" in Google > User lands on mysite.com > search data is assigned to global variables that I can use in my affiliate link redirect script. afflink.com/?id=123&keyword=[GA keyword variable] Anybody know how I would go about doing that? I've seen other Non-GA tracking scripts do this but I can't figure it out here and it's driving me crazy! Thanks,
Affiliate Marketing | | drewhammond
Drew EDIT: Just figured it out after a lot of guess and testing... I'm not sure if the way I'm doing it is the fastest, most optimized way but it works. Solution: I can pull the GA cookie and break it down to retrieve the keyword using PHP. For anyone searching for this in the future, here's how I did it: $gacookie = $_COOKIE['__utmz'];
$keyword = substr(strstr($gacookie, 'utmctr='),7); ?> Then I can use the $keyword variable wherever I need it. I haven't actually tested this on a live site yet but everything is working fine as of right now. If anyone has a better solution please feel free to answer.0