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
-
Person using expired domain and its links to drive traffic
Hi, I know about people using expired domains to drive juice to their primary site but what about people using AN expired domain as their primary site (totally changing that site into a trashy affiliate-marketing vehicle)? The site I'm looking at is thegunzone.com. It has, according to Semrush, almost 38K links. It used to be a legit 17-year-old firearms hobby site, and this is what it originally looked like: http://web.archive.org/web/20120213184627/http://thegunzone.com:80/ Here is its last page before it closed and the domain purchased by the affiliate marketer: http://web.archive.org/web/20170315084035/http://www.thegunzone.com/ It closed around February of 2017, and some affiliate marketer bought it and all its backlinks. However, all those backlinks, which were previously to various articles, are now directed back to those articles (which don't exist anymore) but the homepage, including Wikipedia links. Here's an example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polygonal_rifling At the bottom, in the 7th Reference, there's a link to an article called " "Learning About Shooting . . ." but if you click on the original link, it just goes to thegunzone.com homepage. Again, the site's totally different. And there are just thousands of such backlinks to former articles that don't exist anymore but are redirected to this schlocky site's homepage (and it's passing its juice through too). My question is this: this cannot be kosher with Google backlinking policies, right? Is this prevalent on the internet? Why hasn't thegunzone.com been found out and its rankings penalized yet? And how do I report him? I see tons of other sites using this basic strategy too on search results with various hunting keywords. (Disclosure: I do own a hunting/firearms blog, but I don't do any backlinking at all.) Any help would be sincerely appreciated.
Affiliate Marketing | | HandyWoman1 -
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 -
Looking for a way to crawl and test validity of affiliate links at scale. Ideas?
Hey all, I'm on the hunt for a service that will crawl our affiliate links and let us know when they return an error. I need to know that the last URL in the chain is returning a 200 over thousands of pages and links on a continual basis. The hitch is that most crawlers like Screaming Frog will return all of our links as working because it's only testing the first step, and this really requires a cloud solution anyway. Anyone happen to know of something? Edit for clarity's sake: I need something to check entire redirect chains in bulk that isn't a Wordpress plugin, isn't a website where you plug in a URL and it cuts you off after the first 100 results, and has the ability to crawl the site and provide reporting on a continual basis. Bi75jku
Affiliate Marketing | | BradsDeals0 -
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 -
Affiliate marketing: yes or no?
Hello, A colleague recently asked me about affiliate marketing for our clients, and my answer for a few years now has been emphatically "no", because I had not seen it done in positive way. How does everyone weigh in affiliate marketing, and what companies and/or software would you suggest? For example, is http://www.admedia.com/ a reputable source? I see lots of bad reviews on these guys. Any thoughts, suggestions, etc would be extremely valuable. Thanks in advance!
Affiliate Marketing | | lfrazer0 -
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 -
Affiliate URLs Indexed in Google
We have an active in-house affiliate program which has a create-a-link function where affiliate, as in most affiliate programs, can build links back to our content to produce sales. The problem that I am seeing is that some of the affiliate URL versions are being indexed in Google rather than the original page. For instance.. http://www.ourdomain.com/page_start.aspx?affnum=F025212&Start_Page=RaceCar&referrer=createlink is outranking... http://www.ourdomain.com/racecar This presents 2 issues for us. First, this presents duplicate content issues obviously. Second, we pay our affiliates a portion of the sales so, in order to maximize profitability, we'd like the indexed pages to be the original version. What's the best way to handle this? I want to make sure that affiliates continue to get credit for links from their sites but search engine links should go to the original versions.
Affiliate Marketing | | ATIseo0 -
How much link juice passes through urls with affiliate id's?
hi we can get a valuable link with the desired anchor text from a news site. the destination url would be something like www.site.com/product. but in order to track conversions, our sales team would like to add an affiliate id to the url, so that it would look like this: www.site.com/product?sess_affiliate=ta how much link juice would a link to this affiliate url pass? would we be shooting our wad by linking to the ?sess-URL instead of the original URL?
Affiliate Marketing | | zeepartner0