Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
My affiliate links are being crawled by Google. Is this a bad thing? Also, should I add rel: nofollow to affiliate links?
-
Hi All,
I have an issue on Google Search Console. It seems all my affiliate links are being crawled. Is this a bad thing? The reason I found out is that all but one link was flagged with a warming. It goes on to say that it was blocked by robots.txt. The strange thing is that I've not set any links to be blocked in robots.txt.
Also, should affiliate links be nofollow? I'm asking because I was recently sent this article by Yoast on how to properly cloak my affiliate links without using a plugin. https://yoast.com/cloak-affiliate-links/ In the method, they apply the nofollow and noindex rules to the links. I'm just a little confused on how to go about affiliate links the SEO friendly way.
-
I was facing the same issue on my site. After checking a few guides, here is what I found
-
Make them no-follow (better add the new sponsored tag in them)
-
Yes, it is a bad thing
-
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
-
What is the danger of integrating different affiliate program widgets far under our core content?
We have pages with lots of unique content that are ranking very well in google.
Affiliate Marketing | | lcourse
I am now considering to add towards the end of the pages widgets from the booking.com affiliate program and also from the affiliate program of two other accommodtion sites. These affilliate widgets would be placed far beyond our core content in the bottom 15% of the page. Each widget will contain a large number of links to the different accomodation options that booking.com or others offer. In our context this information would be indeed very useful for our visitors. Shall I be concerned that our google rankings may suffer due to google perceiving our site as less quality (or google misinterpreting our intent to generate traffic to affiliate programs) ? If google rankings would be suffering, is this something we would normally see in a week (most of our pages are crawled daily by google) and then recover in a week when we would remove the widgets or would this generally be something that would affect the ranking over the course of a month or more? Shall I be concerned abou link dillution since my pages would now have a lot of links pointing to the affiliate sites, which could devalue my internal links? Any thoughts?0 -
Is Affiliate Duplicate Content?
Hi moz fans!
Affiliate Marketing | | KasperK
I'm working on some client sites.
They have a lot of products, which they are selling through their webshop and two affiliate sites.
But I can't stop wondering:
The affilate sites are using the same product descriptions and images - Will Google see that as duplicate content?
And if so.. How can I prevent that? The two affiliate sites are well etablished and huge sites, so I guess they know what they are doing.. Is there some way I can check it? When I do a google search, whit the "My product description text", I'm getting some different results: Sometimes all three sites appear (main site, and affilate) Sometimes it's only the affilates Sometimes it's only the main site. So to make it short:
If i'm using affliate, will Google see it as duplicate content?
How do I check it, and how do I prevent it? Thank you!0 -
Affiliate Program: Does anyone know how to set this up?
Hi Guys Does anyone know how I can make a affiliate programme on my website eg - I have a sales person in two of our local regions and I want to find a way I can track any sales made through them via my website so I can pay them their commission. Any advice around this, the website is wordpress! Cheers Justin
Affiliate Marketing | | edward-may0 -
How to setup affiliate marketing for my website?
I work for an ecommerce company and would like to setup some sort of affiliate marketing similar to Amazon. 1. If someone was referred to our site and they made a purchase we would pay out. 2. If we referred a user to someone else's page and they made a purchase we would get paid. I looked into http://www.commissionfactory.com/ but wasn't sure if that would meet my needs. Does anyone have any recommendations?
Affiliate Marketing | | EcommerceSite0 -
Affiliate Programs
Hi, I am wondering what if any affiliate management applications are being used out there. Anyone using Shareasale... I am looking into them.
Affiliate Marketing | | unikey0 -
Why do my Google Analytics campaign URLs not show up in reports?
Hi guys, I'm puzzled because of my affiliate campaign URLs not showing up properly in my Google Analytics reports. I'll try to explain what I did and I hope some of you can provide advice on how to proceed from there on. What do I want to do?
Affiliate Marketing | | NHA_DistanceLearning
Actually, what I want to do is quite simple. I tagged a few URLs for Google Analytics to show up in my campaign reports. I used the URL builder to do so. Example: http://www.nhad.de?utm_source=affiliate&utm_medium=zanox&utm_content=banner&utm_campaign=105x139. Is that the entire URL?
Uhm, no. Because of the active de-duplication script on our website, I need to put some characters in front of it: **www.nhad.de/affiliate.aspx?NETWORK=ZANOX&NEXTURL=**http://www.nhad.de?utm_source=affiliate&utm_medium=zanox&utm_content=banner&utm_campaign=105x139. Yikes. Yes, I know. What do I see?
Basically, when I paste the above url and run it in (for example) Chrome, only this shows up in my browser: www.nhad.de/?utm_source=affiliate. In my Analytics reports, the campaign URL is not recognised, just the source in my traffic report. The medium is indicated with 'not set'. What am I doing wrong, and what can I do to make my campaigns appear in Analytics? Best, Bas0 -
Amazon Links destroyed my rankings, I removed them, will my site recover?
Hello, Last week I got the glorious idea to put amazon affiliate links on my website. I didn't put a rel=nofollow on them or deindex the pages they were on. Precisely I put some reviews and 10 different amazon links on one page and I put that into my navigation so all inner pages were linking to that page. When Google crawled my page again, I had a 60% traffic drop. 3 days later when I found out what caused this (amazon links) I completely removed the site containing those links and removed all links to that page from my site. Now my rankings are still down, will my site recover from this or is it lost? And how long would you think it'll take?
Affiliate Marketing | | SeeSharp10 -
Google Analytics Tracking Pixels for Third-Party sites???
Hello, Does anyone know if it is possible to track an event on a third party site and have it post back to your Google Analytics account? For example, I am sending traffic to a partners site and I want to know if that traffic I am sending them will hit a specific point of conversion (a sale) and I'm wondering if it possible to place a tracking pixel on their thankyou.html page that gets recorded in my google analytics?
Affiliate Marketing | | shawn810