Incoming affiliate links: is it better to follow or nofollow?
-
Hello here,
this question is from a merchant stand point, and here is a typical scenario: this merchant has thousand of affiliate incoming links. Affiliates link to specific product pages with their affiliate ID passed as a parameter as:
http://www.merchantsite.com/products/product_page/?affid=[affiliate_id]
and users get 301 redirected to a clean URL like:
http://www.merchantsite.com/products/product_page/
after that a cookie is stored into the user's browser for tracking purposes.
Now, my question is the following: is for the merchant more convenient to have its affiliates linking with follow or nofollow links? Is that actually relevant? What are the pros and cons?
Thank you in advance for any insights!
-
Thank you Everett, that makes sense and I will do that indeed!
Thank you again very much for all your help guys.
Best,
Fabrizio
-
Hello Fabrizo,
That I know of, having too many nofollow links will not harm your site - other than there being fewer followable links, and thus less pagerank.
These links have commercial intent. Someone is getting compensated for linking to you, which means they should be nofollowed if you wish to stay within Google's Webmaster Guidelines. Nobody can make the risk Vs reward decision for you, but it does seem that penalties are getting more and more difficult to come out of. It could ruin a business if the website was penalized or filtered for months - even years - as a result of an algorithm update designed to crack down on followable affiliate links.
With that being said, you could always approach your highest trusted affiliates (good website, great content, links mixed into the content in a natural way) and offer them a higher commission rate for being such good affiliates. Of course, that would be a good reason to provide them with new link code, at which point you could take Naku's excellent advice on running them (via 301) through another site that allows you to sever the redirect at any time in case you need to clean up your link profile. You would of course need to notify the affiliates if you ever decide to do that since they worked hard to produce the content and add the links, only to have them 404 some day.
-
Thank you Nakul, I agree with you and I will do that way! I have my last concern here: may having an high number of incoming nofollow links be a problem? I mean, if I have much more incoming "nofollow" links vs "follow" compared with my competitors, may be that an issue? From the SEOmoz Competitive Link Analysis tool I already see my incoming link profile having much more nofollow links than my competitors... I am still figuring out if that's actually a problem or not!
This last question will close my research here.
Thank you again very much.
-
You are 100% right. That's it. The concern is having 100's of thousands of links that would be very very low quality links. The affiliate link pattern will make it "sort of okay" if you decide to keep them follow. Those links are there for the affiliate tracking, but typically the majority of the web uses some sort of an affiliate tracking site like GAN (Which is closing down), CJ, Linkshare etc. Considering that, is it really worth the risk of having that many number of links ? Maybe, maybe not. And that's the business decision you need to make.
The affiliate traffic and sales is important (which justifies the affiliate program). Your natural SEO rankings (current and future rankability) helps you justify the importance of these kinds of decisions and which is why you are asking this question.
We just need to find the right balance without tripping too much on either side.
-
Thank you Nakul. May I ask you what are the reasons to use a nofollow? Is that just to avoid any possible penalization? And here is my natural question: by doing that, will I lose any possible link juice coming currently from my affiliates? Or do you think that I am not getting that anyway?
Thank you again!
-
I'd suggest using a rel="nofollow" in the link to you.
-
Thank you for your reply.
The website I am talking about is my main website virtualsheetmusic.com
I have several hundreds of affiliates that have integrated our data feed on their own website, and so we may have thousands of incoming links from each affiliate. We have our in-house affiliate program and despite we can apply a URL shortener as you are suggesting, that would take a long time to have all the affiliates update their own websites. But that's a great idea we could start deploying soon! Would you suggest to use a 301 redirect there too?
Despite that, what about my original follow-nofollow question? In my current situation, what can I tell my affiliates to do: follow or nofollow?
Thanks!
-
Fabrizo
How big is your natural link profile ? How many affiliate links are we talking ? Do you get a lot of natural links ? Is this your own affiliate program ? Can you do some sort of a link shortener of your own ? EG:
http://www.MSLink.com/whatever/?affid=[affiliate_id]
that redirects to
http://www.merchantsite.com/products/product_page/?affid=[affiliate_id]
which then further redirects to your product page.
This way if there are future problems, you can change/remove the redirects from MSLink.com if they happen to be hurting you anytime in the future while maintaining full control.
I hope this helps.
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
-
Top hierarchy pages vs footer links vs header links
Hi All, We want to change some of the linking structure on our website. I think we are repeating some non-important pages at footer menu. So I want to move them as second hierarchy level pages and bring some important pages at footer menu. But I have confusion which pages will get more influence: Top menu or bottom menu or normal pages? What is the best place to link non-important pages; so the link juice will not get diluted by passing through these. And what is the right place for "keyword-pages" which must influence our rankings for such keywords? Again one thing to notice here is we cannot highlight pages which are created in keyword perspective in top menu. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Hammered by Spam links
When we moved from one host to another in Wordpress engine, we had this insertion weird redirect thing happen. We 410'd the page cgi-sys/movingpage.cgi, but it hit us hard in the anchors. If you go to ahrefs, we are literally all Asian in anchors text. Anybody have any suggestions, thank goodness it looks like it finally stopped. I am looking for creative ways to repopulate our back end with the right stuff. Any thoughts would be great! Heres a example: allartalocaltours.com/tumi-tote-401.html ↳customerbloom.com/cgi-sys/movingpage.cgi ↳www.customerbloom.com/cgi-sys/movingpage.cgi ↳lockwww.customerbloom.com/cgi-sys/movingpage.cgi
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mattguitar990 -
Maximum number of links
Hi there, I have just written an article that is due to be posted on an external blog, the article has potentially 3 links that could link to 3 different pages on my website, is this too much? what do you recommend being the maximum number of links? Thanks for any help
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul780 -
Best links to gain?
Hi, Just a quick one to see what peoples thoughts are regarding links. I have just gained a free link on a .gov website in the UK. In one of their offers pages, will this provide any link value or domain trust to me and what can the benefits be SEO wise from having a link on a government domain? The link is just the website url with a a few lines of text detailing our address etc... so its not got any anchor text regarding targetting one of our brands. It is equallly, less or more important to target anchor text links to specific brands or to get good high quality links from trusted sites such as the .gov one I have linking to my root domain? The website is a local council website in the UK. And was listed by a member of their staff, who only list in the offer page if your offering discount to council members etc..., so its not a spammed page or anything like that. What are peoples views on anchor text links vs domain url links? Cheers Will
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | YNWA0 -
My site links have gone from a mega site links to several small links under my SERP results in Google. Any ideas why?
A site I have currently had the mega site links on the SERP results. Recently they have updated the mega links to the smaller 4 inline links under my SERP result. Any idea what happened or how do I correct this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | POSSIBLE0 -
Can I reduce number of on page links by just adding "no follow" tags to duplicate links
Our site works on templates and we essentially have a link pointing to the same place 3 times on most pages. The links are images not text. We are over 100 links on our on page attributes, and ranking fairly well for key SERPS our core pages are optimized for. I am thinking I should engage in some on-page link juice sculpting and add some "no follow" tags to 2 of the 3 repeated links. Although that being said the Moz's on page optimizer is not saying I have link cannibalization. Any thoughts guys? Hope this scenario makes sense.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | robertrRSwalters0 -
Reciprocal Links and nofollow/noindex/robots.txt
Hypothetical Situations: You get a guest post on another blog and it offers a great link back to your website. You want to tell your readers about it, but linking the post will turn that link into a reciprocal link instead of a one way link, which presumably has more value. Should you nofollow your link to the guest post? My intuition here, and the answer that I expect, is that if it's good for users, the link belongs there, and as such there is no trouble with linking to the post. Is this the right way to think about it? Would grey hats agree? You're working for a small local business and you want to explore some reciprocal link opportunities with other companies in your niche using a "links" page you created on your domain. You decide to get sneaky and either noindex your links page, block the links page with robots.txt, or nofollow the links on the page. What is the best practice? My intuition here, and the answer that I expect, is that this would be a sneaky practice, and could lead to bad blood with the people you're exchanging links with. Would these tactics even be effective in turning a reciprocal link into a one-way link if you could overlook the potential immorality of the practice? Would grey hats agree?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AnthonyMangia0 -
Adding Links Under Embedded Videos?
What's the current opinion of adding do-follow links under video embed codes? Like what Vimeo does. Is this allowed, or does Google/Matt Cutts suggest always no-following these links?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DojoGuy0