Is it worth disavowing entire affiliate network?
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Question for the pro's (all comments greatly appreciated) and it's doing my head in atmo. Recently, we received a temporary algorithmic penalty on one of our pages, which was originally ranking 12th, now 50+. We found out an affiliate put a site-wide link to our site, using the affiliate ID blablabla.
I have taken a look at the exact link and checked the status codes on it, seems as if the link uses a 302 to our page. However, yes, you can argue that 302's d on't pass link juice, but I do believe that if a 302 remains in place for a while - Google will treat it as a 301.
My question is: considering that affiliate links are causing us problems, is it worth disavowing the ENTIRE affiliate network? - we have over 100,00 links coming from them, all of which are targeting different pages and using different affiliate tracking ID's.
What do you think - I don't want to disavow the site then realise it was actually some-what helping the site.
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I would suggest not disavowing a list of this size. My suggestions to you would be to create a robots.txt file and upload it to Google search console. This way you can continue to get traffic from the affiliate site, but it will tell Google not to crawl the domain.
Hope this helps, if you have additional questions please feel free to ask.
Chris Hickman
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So, a series of questions to better understand:
- Have you asked the affiliate to remove the sitewide link to see if your rankings pop back up?
- Can we assume you did full troubleshooting to identify this one sitewide affiliate as being the root cause of the problem vs. a potential mass duplication problem from indexing all of the variations of the URL with the affiliate tags?
- When you say it 302 redirects, is the 302 from www.yoursite.com/product?afid=someaffiliate to www.yoursite.com/product?
- How are you handling the query parameter in GSC?
- Do you have a canonical tag in place pointing to the parameterless URL?
- Do you noindex,nofollow pages that have the affiliate parameter on them?
For the record, please don't go implement all of these things above, as some would be conflicting ..e.g. the canonical and the noindex both could cause serious problems.
You could certainly disavow that specific affiliate directly in search console, but I would probably hesitate to disavow the entire affiliate network, as that may later have negative consequences on your affiliates (discrediting them, unnatural outbound links penalties, etc.) and would eliminate any authority you could be currently benefiting from... e.g. maybe you only ranked #12 because of your affiliate links?
Cheers,
Jake
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