Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Can Affiliate Links Harm Your Rank?
-
Does Google interpret Affiliate links as paid links?
If so, can Affiliate links harm your rank if they are not properly tagged with a no-follow?
Thanks.
-
What if the affiliate links are follow but they go to an specific subdomain which disallows robots via robots.txt.
Can those kind of links hurt the main domain?
Thanks in advanced.
Jabi
-
Interesting. I didn't know anything about this - affecting the sender and receiver. I'll do some more digging. Thanks for shedding light on this for me.
-
It depends on how the affiliate links are set up. Let's say your affilaites using a tracking parameter (like "affiliate="). Now, you link them to a product page, such as:
You could end up with a bunch of indexed pages...
www.example.com/product1.php?affiliate=1
www.example.com/product1.php?affiliate=2
...etc. Those would all be seen as duplicates. Again, I'm only speaking in generalities. I don't know how your links are currently set up.
-
Hi Dr. Meyers. Thanks for the note and the link. I understand the first part of your response. However, I don't fully undertand the second part. How will an incoming affiliate link create duplicate content for me (the recipient of the link)?
-
It's less common than when you're using obvious paid links, but there is some amount of risk. It really depends on how strong and diverse your link profile is. If you're talking a relatively small percentage, it's probably ok. If the majority of your links are affiliate links, it could look shady to Google. It depends on the nature of the links, the industry, etc. too.
The other issue is that affiliate links can often create duplicate content issues, so it can make sense to consolidate them (usually, with canonical tags or 301-redirects). That's a separate issue, though.
You might find this post from Joost de Valk interesting:
http://yoast.com/affiliate-links-and-seo/
Edit: A couple more posts - it's a complex topic:
http://www.darrinward.com/blog/seo/google-penalty-nofollow-affiliate-links
http://www.wolf-howl.com/affiliate-marketing/how-to-mask-affiliate-links/
-
I have never heard of anything bad connected with affiliate links.
I have seen at least 2 websites that use affiliate marketing and they are doing good.
- <cite>www.undergroundtraininglab.com/</cite>
- <cite>www.ultimatewowguide.com/</cite>
Both these sites even have sitelinks.
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 can I find all broken links pointing to my site?
I help manage a large website with over 20M backlinks and I want to find all of the broken ones. What would be the most efficient way to go about this besides exporting and checking each backlink's reponse code? Thank you in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | StevenLevine3 -
If I nofollow outbound external links to minimize link juice loss > is it a good/bad thing?
OK, imagine you have a blog, and you want to make each blog post authoritative so you link out to authority relevant websites for reference. In this case it is two external links per blog post, one to an authority website for reference and one to flickr for photo credit. And one internal link to another part of the website like the buy-now page or a related internal blog post. Now tell me if this is a good or bad idea. What if you nofollow the external links and leave the internal link untouched so all internal links are dofollow. The thinking is this minimizes loss of link juice from external links and keeps it flowing through internal links to pages within the website. Would it be a good idea to lay off the nofollow tag and leave all as do follow? or would this be a good way to link out to authority sites but keep the link juice internal? Your thoughts are welcome. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Rich_Coffman0 -
Can you apply schema to a newsletter signup link?
I was curious if it is possible to markup a newsletter signup link for a client. If yes, what schema property should I use? https://schema.org/Action?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RosemaryB0 -
Does Disavowing Links Negate Anchor Text, or Just Negates Link Juice
I'm not so sure that disavowing links also discounts the anchor texts from those links. Because nofollow links absolutely still pass anchor text values. And disavowing links is supposed to be akin to nofollowing the links. I wonder because there's a potential client I'm working on an RFP for and they have tons of spammy directory links all using keyword rich anchor texts and they lost 98% of their traffic in Pengiun 1.0 and haven't recovered. I want to know what I'm getting into. And if I just disavow those links, I'm thinking that it won't help the anchor text ratio issues. Can anyone confirm?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MiguelSalcido0 -
URL Value: Menu Links vs Body Content Links
Hi All, I'm a little confused. I have read a number of articles from authority sites that give mixed signals over the importance of menu links vs body content links. It is suggested that whilst all menu links spread link juice equally, Google does not see them as favourably. Inserting a link within the body will add more link juice value to the desired page. Any thoughts would be appreciated. Thanks Mark
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mark_Ch0 -
Canonical Tag and Affiliate Links
Hi! I am not very familiar with the canonical tag. The thing is that we are getting traffic and links from affiliates. The affiliates links add something like this to the code of our URL: www.mydomain.com/category/product-page?afl=XXXXXX At this moment we have almost 2,000 pages indexed with that code at the end of the URL. So they are all duplicated. My other concern is that I don't know if those affilate links are giving us some link juice or not. I mean, if an original product page has 30 links and the affiliates copies have 15 more... are all those links being counted together by Google? Or are we losing all the juice from the affiliates? Can I fix all this with the canonical tag? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jorgediaz0 -
Switching to masked affiliate links
Hi there, I run a content affiliate website where I introduce products in articles and then link to merchants where the user can buy the respective product. Currently I am using regular affiliate links here with the "nofollow" attribute. With growing size of the site, I would like to switch to masked affiliate links, so instead of a link like "jdoqocy.com/click-123" I want to use "mydomain.com/recommend/123". My question here is: When switching to masked affiliate links, does it makes sense to also convert all the older unmasked affiliate links? If yes, what would be the best way to do that - Convert all old links at once or convert them over time (e.g. over a few month)? Currently about 2/3 of my site's outbound links are unmasked, external affiliate links. So I am afraid that changing this relatively large share of links from unmasked external affiliate links to masked links doenst look natural at all... Thank you for your advice!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FabRag0