Does Google Consider a Follow Affiliate Link into my site a paid link?
-
Let's say I have a link coming into my domain like this
http://www.mydomain.com/l/freerol.aspx?AID=674&subid=Week+2+Freeroll&pid=120
Do you think Google recognizes this as paid link? These links are follow links. I am working on a site that has tons of these, but ranks fairly well. They did lose some ranking over the past month or so, and I am wondering if it might be related to a recent iteration of Penguin. These are very high PR inbound links and from a number of good domains, so I would not want to make a mistake and have client get affiliates to no follow if that is going to cause his rankings to drop more.
Any thoughts would be appreciated.
-
Hello Robert,
So doing the right thing for the client aside (which would be to advise them to nofollow those links for their own long-term benefit), if they are still ranking very well it is doubtful that they have a site-wide "penalty" or "filter" like Penguin, Panda or any others. Most likely if traffic has dropped significantly, but not dramatically, you could be looking at a loss of pagerank (not the green bar PR, but the real stuff) due to Google blocking the flow of PR from those, or other, links.
If that is the case then nofollowing them would neither help nor hurt because they aren't being counted anyway, and the site isn't currently being filtered or penalized. However, it could help in the future if you nofollowed them because you never know when "not counting" a link could turn into "penalizing you for it". It could only be an update away...
-
Thanks guys...I think if we take a strict interpretation of Google guidelines, we would no follow these links, but again they have lots of these and very solid rankings. So, I am reluctant to no follow them (assuming we can) if they are helping as rankings are generally good and have tailed off in past 30 days or so a bit.
Any of you (or anybody else) have some real world experience with this?
Thanks!
-
yeah, the thing is DA is a metric that WAS able to predict rankings, but not anymore since the introductions of penguin and panda.
You can research endless niches and you'll find that high DA or PR show up lower than sites with no PR or DA due to an algorithmic/manual penalty.
-
Very good question, I am not sure how Google see's affiliate links but in my experience a site showcasing your product via an affiliate link has contibuted positively to DA. Be interesting to hear what the current word is on this?
-
Affiliate links are a kind of "paid links" as the affiliate gets a remuneration for placing the link there (indirect, but still).
They should be nofollow'ed, it could be a little late now as you can't force affiliates to change the links, but if you are placing them using javascript, it should be pretty easy (even injecting them with a js file should use the rel=nofollow attribute.
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
-
Hlp with site setup
Hi there and thanks for the great information, certainly lots to take in. Can anyone suggest the best way to setup product / category url structure for a store? At the moment we have something like domainname.com/parentcategory/subcategory/product name.html As the product url, we edited url structure using a plugin, we don't use default WooCommerce url settings. domainname.com/parentcategory/subcategory/product name.html. this can sometimes be long But when you click on the product the url changes to the following. domainname.com/product name.html. This can shorted the url by 40% and still have keyword in url Is there any benefit in doing his? Re canonical urls, I only have about 15 products that are selected in many categories.the other 200 are under once category only. Product pages don't have many backlinks at the moment. Thanking you so much.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | IvanaDaulay0 -
Pinging Links
Interested to know if anybody still uses the strategy of pinging links to make sure they get indexed, there are a number of sites out there which offer it. Is it considered dangerous/spamy?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | seoman100 -
What is really a bad link in 2017?
Hi, Routine answer is: A link which doesn't provides any value. Tired of listening to this statement where we can see number of back-links been generated with different scenarios. There are still many low DA websites which speaks exactly about a brand and link a brand naturally. So, is this a bad link or good link? Let's be honest here. No one gonna visit such pages and browse through our website; it's all about what it's been doing in-terms of SEO. Do these websites to be in disavow list? Beside the context how a brand been mentioned, what are the other metrics to disavow a domain? Expecting some real answers for this straight question. If it's a low DA site and speaking about exactly our website- Good or bad? Vice-versa...high DA website mentioned website with less matching content. What is the proportion of website authority and content context? Can we keep a medium DA backlinks with some Moz spam score?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Do industry partner links violate Google's policies?
We're in the process of The Great _Inquisition_piecing together a reconsideration request. In doing so, we reached out to an agency to filter and flag our backlinks as safe, should be no-followed, or should be removed. The problem is, they flagged several of our earned, industry partner links (like those pointing to us, HireAHelper, from 1-800-Pack-Rat and PODS for example) as either should be no-followed or should be removed. I have a hard time believing Google would penalize such a natural source of earned links, but then again, this is our second attempt at a Reconsideration Request, and I want to cover all my bases. What say you Moz community? No-follow? Remove? Leave alone?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | DanielH0 -
Penalty for all new sites on a domain?
Hi @all, a friend has an interesting problem. He got a manuel link penalty in the end of 2011...it is an old domain with domainpop >5000 but with a lot bad links (wigdet and banners and other seo domains, but nothing like scrapebox etc)...he lost most of the traffic a few days after the notification in WMT (unnatural links) and an other time after the first pinguin update in april´12. In the end of 2012 after deleting (or nofollowing) and disavow a lot of links google lifted the manuel penalty (WMT notification). But nothing happened after lifting, the rankings didn´t improve (after 4 months already!). Almost all money keywords aren´t in the top 100, no traffic increases and he has good content on this domain. We built a hand of new trust links to test some sites but nothing improved. We did in february a test and build a completely new site on this domain, it´s in the menu and got some internal links from content...We did it, because some sites which weren´t optimized before the penalty (no external backlinks) are still ranking on the first google site for small keywords. After a few days the new site started to rank with our keyword between 40-45. That was ok and as we expected. This site was ranking constantly there for almost 6 weeks and now its gone since ten days. We didn´t change anything. It´s the same phenomena like the old sites on this domain...the site doesnt even rank for the title! Could it still be an manuel penalty for the hole domain or what kind of reasons are possible? Looking forward for your ideas and hope you unterstand the problem! 😉 Thanks!!!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | TheLastSeo0 -
How to handle footer links after Penguin?
With the launch of Google's Penguin I know that footer links could possibly hurt rankings. Also too many links on a page are also bad. I have a client http://www.m-scribe.com That has footer links creating well over 100 links on many of their pages. How should I handle these footer links? Suggestions are greatly appreciated.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | RonMedlin0 -
Will the links coming from an article in certain BLOG / NEWS SITE become a GOOD BackLink?
Such as, if i wrote a ymoz, and suddenly the articles is accepted, will the link to our site coming out of that Article Post increased our SEO Standing? Another example would be http://active.tutsplus.com , yesterday i have successfully pitched a tutorial idea, and they told me to write it so that they can published it , and they also promised that i will be able to put my site link (dofollow) ... But will these link be a Good BackLink that will increase our site's SEO Standing? The last one is exactly the same link , but this time coming from a News Site , such as http://teknologi.kompasiana.com/internet/2011/06/09/website-full-flash-dengan-inovasi-hebat-karya-indonesia/ , in this article (kompasiana is a very wellknown site news in Indonesia, in fact KOMPAS is the biggest newspaper firm in Indonesia) , our site is being featured , there is a link coming out of that article (DOFOLLOW), but will that link make our site much more SEO Friendly? Again please enlighten me 🙂
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | IKT0
