SEO value of affiliate external links
-
There are websites that have linked to my site. Whenever I hover over link I see my direct website URL and I am not seeing "no follow" when viewing source code so I assume these are passing link juice. However when I click on link it directs briefly to shareasale (affiliate account) in web address bar, but then quickly directs back to my website URL as directed. I was curious if these good links I am acquiring truly pass juice or since they briefly pass through an affiliate site if that cancels or dilutes the link juice. Also I am noticing when inspecting element that after the HREF it says class="external-link"
I am just not sure if my link building efforts are being ruined by having an affiliate account running.I did not tell them I had one. I guess they are searching to see that I have one and trying to make a few extra commission dollars.
-
I see a ton of churn with small, boutique merchants, and even the large ones have been grumbling lately about not wanting to support certain types of websites. I think it really depends on how effectively you're able to leverage your publishers, but as with everything you get a lot of merchants who join up with no idea how to do that.
-
This is how I see it work in practice when a merchant closes their ShareASale program:
our nice clean cloaked link --303--> shareasale affiliate link --302--> Destination URL (status code 200)
Assuming that the links you're seeing aren't cloaked, even if the user who clicks on an old ShareASale affiliate link does in fact land on your site, they're still getting pushed to the destination page through a 302. So there's not going to be much SEO value in these links, if there's any at all.
In our case, when a SAS program dies, the destination page is the front page of our site, not the merchant's site. This may be an account setting somewhere within our publisher account or something customizable, but it's not something the merchant gets to control.
-
Hi Nicholas,
To lead on from what others have said, I'd agree that these links are unlikely to be passing value from a ranking perspective i.e. they're not likely to pass PageRank. Google do try and detect affiliate links and as Matt has said, they see these as placed to get affiliate revenue as opposed to being placed because someone genuinely endorses the website in question.
In terms of how this actually works, I'm not too familiar with Sharesale personally. But I know that similar affiliate programs provide plugins / scripts to affiliates which can make the link look natural, but when clicked, some JavaScript kicks in and adds the affiliate URL and the redirect. The website owner themselves can also do this themselves if they want to "mask" the affiliate link so that when someone hovers over the link, they see a nice clean URL rather than a potentially long and messy affiliate link.
In terms of what you can do - it really comes down to whether you value the traffic from the affiliate and if that drives revenue. If it does, then that's more valuable (I'd guess) than having a normal link. Plus, would they actually link to you at all if they couldn't get affiliate revenue? If not, then stepping out of the affiliate program may cause more harm than good. But it's really a balance between the affiliate revenue and potential link benefit.
I hope that helps a bit!
Paddy
-
I didn't see anything about these links showing up in GSC. If that's the case, please let us know. I have seen links show up there before that first 302 redirect to another site. In theory, these shouldn't pass pagerank, but historically Google has had some trouble figuring out 302s.
Nicholas, I agree with Matt Antonio as well. If the link the href tag goes to a ShareaSale URL it should not pass pagerank.
However, it looks like instead of just going through a 302 redirect, affiliate links like the one below just go to a 200 (OK) status page, which uses javascript (window.location.replace) to send the user on to the merchant's site. It doesn't surprise me that this could become an issue now that Google is so good at crawling javascript. But they are still pretty terrible about figuring out what it "means" in terms of what should show in the search results.
Are merchants still getting good ROI from programs on massive affiliate networks? It's been awhile since I've seen that work in a brand's favor over the long term.
-
The links ARE setup like this Link to your product
I am confused on how it knows to briefly direct to Shareasale. In this source code there is nothing that looks out of place. It looks like a completely normal link except it does contain the verbiage class="external-link" other than that it looks regular. These links are ALSO showing up in webmaster tools as DO FOLLOW.
-
A link can't be direct to your site, then refer back to shareasale, then redirect back to your site unless you've set it up that way somehow.
So if someone builds a shareasale link like:
This is going to shareasale. If you quit shareasale and they said it would still go directly to you, they're just not planting their tracking cookie on the intermediate step. Everything else would remain the same.
If the link is something like:
Link to product and somehow that goes from your site, to shareasale, back to your site - well that's definitely not helping you very much for SEO and if you quit, yes that would then go directly to your site - but only if you reconfigured how the links were working since this type of linking would require a lot of special work to make it happen. It's more likely it's the 1st example.
In any case, they both pass through Shareasale and, per Matt Cutts, Google is attempting to not give you credit for that link. Whether or not they do, I can't say - but they're attempting not to. I'm not sure which part of my previous answer may not be "completely true."
-
I am not sure if this is completely true, however I contacted Shareasale about these links. I asked them if I were to close my Shareasale account, they said the link would then just directly go to me. The anchor link is indeed directly pointing to my site. I am not sure how google can read that it is affiliate looking at source code alone?
-
Matt is correct, link as redirect from affiliate site doesn't pass link juice, but it does count as a link with several other search engines, such as Bing usually do pass. Also I am strong believer in Matt Cutts theory, but he hasn't been part of Google for quite some times, Google is rolling out unnamed algorithms, meaning everything is possible specially if you are finding those links in webmaster search console.
-
These type of links are generally demoted/do not pass juice in the first place.
Matt Cutts said in the past in an interview with Eric Enge:
Matt Cutts: 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.
To me, Shareasale is a huge provider of affiliate links so I would assume Google is well onto those links and doesn't count them. You aren't going to get a ranking benefit from these links, IMO.
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
-
Will link juice still be passed if you have the same links in multiple, outreach articles?
We are developing high quality, unique content and sending them out to bloggers to for guest posts. In these articles we have links to 2 to 3 sites. While the links are completely relevant, each article points to the same 2 to 3 sites. The link text varies slightly from article to article, but the linked-to site/URLs remain the same. We have read that it is best to have 2 to 3 external links, not all pointing to the same site. We have followed this rule, but the 2 to 3 external sites are the same sites on the other articles. I'm having a hard time explaining this, so I hope this makes sense. My concern is, will Google see this as a pattern and link juice won't be passed to the linked-to URLs, or worst penalize all/some of the sites being linked to or linked from? Someone I spoke to had suggest that my "link scheme" describes a "link wheel" and the site(s) will be penalized by Penguin. Is there any truth to this statement?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Cutopia0 -
Base href + relative link href for canonical link
I have a site that in the head section we specify a base href being the domain with a trailing slash and a canonical link href being the relative link to the domain. <base <="" span="">href="http://www.domain.com/" /> href="link-to-page.html" rel="canonical" /> I know that Google recommends using an absolute path as a canonical link but is specifying a base href with a relative canonical link the same thing or is it still seen as duplicate content?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Nobody16116990439410 -
Our site is on a secure server (https) will a link to http:// be of less value?
Our site is hosted on a secure network (I.E. Our web address is - https://www.workbooks.com). Will a backlink pointing to: http://www.workbooks.com provide less value than a link pointing to: https://www.workbooks.com ? Many thanks, Sam
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Sam.at.Moz0 -
Do I need to use rel="canonical" on pages with no external links?
I know having rel="canonical" for each page on my website is not a bad practice... but how necessary is it for pages that don't have any external links pointing to them? I have my own opinions on this, to be fair - but I'd love to get a consensus before I start trying to customize which URLs have/don't have it included. Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Netrepid0 -
PR links
Its seems that at lot of or competitors are using PR site to place articles with links. They are using the same article across many sites with the same anchor text link - But they seem to be doing very well in the rankings.... I have steered away from this type of linking as I assumed Google wouldn't be keen on this type of activity but I seem to be wrong.... Any views on this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jj34340 -
Links on My website
I am looking to create some more trust on my website by subscribing to BBB. I have heard that my site is penalized and loses "link juice" if I place the BBB logo link in my page footer on every page of my website. Does anyone know how much I am penalized? Should I only put it on my conversion pages and maybe my main 10 sub pages? My main goal is to assist in getting conversions but I don't want to do it at the expense of getting a penalty. Any help is greatly appreciated. Thank you, Boo
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Boodreaux0 -
How to promote some links on google
Hi our site is http://www.mycarhelpline.com If people search on our site in Google by typing - Mycarhelpline they see links - why mycarhelpline, contact us and about us how can we put some other key pages by replacing above pages
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Modi0