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
-
Links Not Detected by MOZ, AHREFS, GSC-ARE THESE QUALITY LINKS?
Our SEO provider has been creating content (6 blog posts per month as well as building page write ups) and has been promoting that content. Several links per month have been created as a result of this effort. Many of the links have been from commercial real estate publications. I am concerned that the quality of these links is not high enough to improve our ranking. Most links do not appear on AHREFS, Google Search Console or MOZ. Is this a red flag that these links are weak? Ranking and traffic on the site have improved considerably since this provider began the project in April of 2019. They have been writing about 30 pages about New York City. commercial buildings each month in addition to 4 short blog posts and 2 extremely well researched and authoritative blog posts. My concern is that the links are not of sufficient quality to result increased ranking. That the improvement in ranking is solely due to the addition of new content rather than the creation of these links. Basically, that I am incurring the cost on an ongoing basis of an link building campaign with little to no benefit. That being the case, I would shift resources to content creation and increase and improve content rather than develop links with little value. A sample of links are below: Would greatly appreciate some feedback as to whether these are in fact helpful to the domain authority, reputation and ranking of our website. Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
Alan https://patch.com/new-york/bayside/bayside-queens-priciest-area-retail-office-space-study https://qns.com/story/2019/12/04/these-commercial-streets-in-queens-were-among-the-most-expensive-in-2019/ https://patch.com/new-york/brooklyn/flatbush-ave-priciest-retail-spot-outside-manhattan-study http://thejewishvoice.com/2019/12/07/nycs-most-expensive-commercial-streets-neighborhoods-in-2019-would-surprise-you/ https://atalyst.com/investment-banking-interview-metro-manhattan/0 -
50 nofollow outbound links is too much?
Hello, I was reading that having many nofollow outbound links is bad for SEO. Could somebody give me an idea how many is "many"?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fabx0 -
Linking to own homepage with keywords as link text
I recently discovered, that previous SEO work on a client's website apparently included setting links from subpages to the homepage using keywords as link text that the whole website should rank for. i.e. (fictional example) a subpage about chocolate would link to the homepage via "Visit the best sweet shop in Dallas and get a free sample." I am dubious about the influence this might have - anybody with any tests? I also think that it is quite weird when considering user friendliness - at least I would not expect such a link to take me to the homepage of the very site I was just on, probably browsing in a relevant page. So, what about such links: actually helpful, mostly don't matter or even potentially harmful? Looking forward to your opinions! Nico
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | netzkern_AG0 -
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 -
Questions About Link Detox
Greetings: In April of 2014 an SEO firm ran a link removal campaign (identified spammy links and uploaded a disavow). The overall campaign was ineffective and MOZ domain rank has fallen to 24 from about 30 in the last year and traffic is 20% lower. I purchased a basic package for Link Detox and ran a report today (see enclosed) to see if toxic links could be contributing to our mediocre rankings. As a novice I have a few questions for you regarding this the use of Link Detox: -We scored a domain wide detox risk of 1,723. The site has referring root domains with 7113 links to our site. 121 links were classified as high audit priority. 56 as medium audit priority. 221 links were previously disavowed and we uploaded a spreadsheet containing the names of the previously disavowed links. We had LinkDetox include an analysis of no-follow links as they recommend this. Is our score really bad? If we remove the questionable links should we see some benefit in ranking? -Some of the links we disavowed last year are still linking to our site. Is it worthwhile to include those links again in our new disavow file? -Prior to filing a disavow we will request that Webmaster remove offending links. LinkDetox offers a package called Superhero for $469.00 that automates the process. Does this package effectively help with the entire process of writing and tracking the removal requests? Do you know of any other good alternatives? -A feature called "Boost" is included in the LinkDetox Super Hero package. It is suppose to expedite Google's processing of the disavow file. I was told by the staff at Link Detox that with Boost Google will process the disavow within a week. Do you have any idea if this claim is valid??? It would be great if it were true. -We never experienced any manual penalty from Google. Will uploading a disavow help us under the circumstances? Thanks for your feedback, I really appreciate it!!! Alan p2S6H7l
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan10 -
.COM or .ORG - Which is better?
I work for a non-profit association. We currently use a .com as our primary, but also own the .org. Should we switch to the .org address? What would the benefits be?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vpoffunk0 -
Link Reclimation & Redirects
Hello, I'm in the middle of a link reclamation project wherein we're identifying broken links, links pointing to dupe content etc. I found a forgotten co-brand which is effectively dupe content across 8 sub-domains, some of which have a significant number of links (200+ linking domains | 2k+ in-bound links). Question for the group is what's the optimal redirect option? Option 1: set 301 and maintain 1:1 URL mapping will pass all equity to applicable PLPs and theoretically improve rank for related keyword(s). requires a bit more configuration time and will likely have small effect on rank given links are widely distributed across URLs. Option 2: set 301 to redirect all requests to the associated sub-domain e.g. foo.mybrand.cobrand.com/page1.html and foo.mybrand.cobrand.com/page2 both redirect to foo.mybrand.com/ will accumulate all equity at the sub-domain level which theoretically will be roughly distributed throughout underlying pages and will limit risk of penalty to that sub-domain. Option 3: set 301 to redirect all requests to our homepage. easiest to configure & maintain, will accumulate the maximum equity on a priority page which should positively affect domain authority. run risk of being penalized for accumulating links en mass, risk penalty for spammy links on our primary sub-domain www, won't pass keyword specific equity to applicable pages. To be clear, I've done an initial scrub of anchor text and there were no signs of spam. I'm leaning towards #3, but interested in others perspectives. Cheers,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PCampolo
Stefan0 -
Are Navigation links different to static links
We are trying to reduce the number of links on our homepage. We could remove some fly out navigation links, We rank 1st on Google for some of these links. Would removing these hurt our SEO. The links are accessible 1 level down if we remove the homepage.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Archers0