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
-
NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW Mistake
One of our top organic landing page was set as "NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW" by "mistake". I took me about a week to realize this after I saw a drop of traffic on that page. I looked on Google to see if it was indexed and my fear were confirmed! After finding our that it was switched to "NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW" I switched it back to "INDEX,FOLLOW" and did an index request in our Google Search Console. Anyone else has run into a similar issue? Did you ever got the page inxed again?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FrankViolette2 -
What is better for Meta description ??
Hi everybody, I noticed that a lot of websites prefer their meta description would be the first words of the content inside.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | roeesa
I on the other hand thought that google will prefer the meta description to be like a peek to what going to be inside.
anyone can explain me, what is better? Thanks 🙂0 -
Stock lists - follow of nofollow?
a bit of a catch 22 position here that i could use some advice on please! We look after a few Car dealership sites that have daily (some 3 times a day) stock feeds that add and remove cars form the site, which in turn removes/creates pages for each vehicle. We all know how much search engines like sites that have content that is updated regularly but the frequency it happens on our sites means we are left with lots of indexed pages that are no longer there. now my question is should i nofollow/disallow robots on all the pages that are for the details of the vehicles meaning the list pages will still be updated daily for "new content" or allow google to index everything and manage the errors to redirect to relevant pages? is there a "best practice" way to do this or is it really personal preference?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ben_dpp0 -
Wrong titles in site links
Hello fellow marketers, I have found this weird thing with our website in the organic results. The sitelinks in the SERP shows wrong written text. As in grammatically incorrect text. My question is where does Google get the text from? It is not the page title as we can see it. kKsFv0X.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | auke18101 -
Ecommerce Internal Linking Questions
I am a bit confused at internal linking for ecommerce site. Is it wise to link say all "boots" term in the review section to the boots page? Zappos is doing this. Wouldn't this incur penguin penalty? Since all internal anchor to that page is "boots" ? Scroll down to the bottom and checkout their reviews: http://www.zappos.com/tony-lama-6071l Is this the wise way to go about doing internal linking? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WayneRooney0 -
Best internal linking structure?
We are considering implementing a site-wide contextual linking structure. Does anyone have some good guidelines / blog posts on this topic? Our site is quite (over 1 million pages), so the contextual linking would be automated, but we need to define a set of rules. Basically, if we have a great page on 'healthy recipes,' should we make every instance of the word 'healthy recipes' link back to that page, or should we limit it to a certain number of pages?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
What type of links should be followed and nofollowed internally?
We have submitted our sitemap.xml to search engines so now that they have that should we use a nofollow attribute on the sitemap.html? Do we even need a sitemap.html? For other links on the site such as: Contact us About Us Locations and other phrases that we are not trying to rank for should we set these to nofollow?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEODinosaur0 -
Linking to bad sites
Hi, I just have a quick question. Is it very negative to link to "bad" sites, such as online pharmacies, dating, adult sites, that sort of stuff? How much does linking to a "bad" site negatively affect a "good" site? Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | salvyy0