Should a site run it's own affiliate program to get inbound links?
-
I've recently signed an ecommerce client who runs their affiliate program through Commission Junction. If they were to bring their program in-house and eventually get all those affiliate links pointed to their domain, would those links be counted?
-
Agreed. If your client has an account with Commission Junction, then they likely have a product or service with good volume. The DIY affiliate programs are good for new or smaller sites that don't have the volume for a service like Commission Junction.
Best,
Christopher -
The short answer is yes, it could have an SEO benefit but I would think carefully about the impact on the affiliate campaign.
The major advantage of being on a major affiliate network is the access to thousands of affiliates, some very large ones. If you took this is house you would need to put a lot of resources into recruiting new affiliates and even then you might not find the quality of affiliate you would get on a major network.
If you took it in house there is of course the tracking, admin and payment side of the affiliate setup to consider, implement and apply resource too as well.
If you (or your client) is serious about the affiliate campaign then I doubt you would improve it by taking it in house.
-
Yes, if they bring the affiliate program in house, some links may be counted. If you use a third-party affiliate app, some of them support SEO (perhaps for an additional cost). Also, keep in mind, the affiliates choice of banners ads vs text ads may affect link juice as well, assuming you decide to make text ads available.
Best,
Christopher -
Affiliate programs are designed to get traffic and sales, not improve search engine ranking. The affiliate generally redirects the link through their own domain with a meta refresh, pretty links or some other method to cloak and protect their affiliate information to ensure they get credit for the referral.
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
-
Other sites linking to our site through sitewide footers
Hello, We have other sites linking to our site through images in sitewide footers, resulting in a link from every page of each site. Those sites are not owned by us and they decided to link to us on their own. They usually link to us as their "sponsor" or "partner", sponsor as in sponsor of some event and partner as in we sometimes work together on joint initiatives. I've searched Moz forum and other articles, but haven't been able to find an answer to this question. We'd like to make sure Google doesn't consider it to be spammy and we don't get any sort of penalty. Should we ask them not to link to us through those images in a sitewide footer or ask them to simply add "nofollow"? We don't want to remove those links if they are not considered to be harmful and removing them will hurt our DA/PA.
Link Building | | marynau0 -
Get number of OUTBOUND link from a domain ??
Hello I´m doing some link profile audit and I noticed that there are some data that would be nice to know for a proper evaluation. The case is the following: Imagine I have a link coming from a blog, so (besides other factors) would be really great to know how many external links follow-nofollow this blog has. I dont mean external links pointing to them (what opensite gives you), what I would like to know is the total number of links this blog has pointing to other external websites. With this data, I would be able to guess in a better way if this blog is selling links or if is spammy. I would be able to know also how this blog/domain distributes its link juice and if the link gives me some value or if is dangerous. I have found some tools/sites but i just get the number of links a specific url has, not the domain info: Screaming frog (but the free version gives you almost nothing, link count checker, etc... ) Do you know any way to get this data in a domain level? You think this data would be important to decide about keeping a link or taking it out? Why none of the powerful tools of the market (opensite, majestic, etc...) provide this info? Many thanks for your help
Link Building | | AutoEurope0 -
I found a link to my customer's site with an over-optimized
I found a link to my customer's site with an over-optimized anchor text using the OpenSite Explorer tool, but when I opened the link, my customer's link is nowhere to be found. Here is the link Opensiteexplorer gave me: http://www.derbymadness.com/my-profile/demolition-derby-groups/viewgroup/12-web And here is my customer's link: 1896omalleyhouse.com The link is not on the cached version of the page either. Can anyone tell me how this might happen? Thanks!
Link Building | | Acorn-IS0 -
Any value in link building to local pages on my site?
If I'm trying to rank for the term 'wedding band' with my url: http://www.musicliveuk.com/home/wedding-bands will linking to local pages such as: http://www.musicliveuk.com/live-acts/hire-wedding-bands/wedding-bands-london help the main page to rank? I added the 'local' pages to try and pick up any traffic from long tail search queries but my main focus is on getting the main page to rank as the traffic from long tail queries is so small. So is it worth me spending time building links to these local pages in order to try and help the main page rank?
Link Building | | SamCUK0 -
Why are good authority links to my site not showing?
Hi, about a month ago, I obtained a couple of good authority external links into my client's site. One of these is from a local government site, ie a .gov.uk website, which has a Domain Authority of 99 according to OSE and a page authority of 67. However, these links are not showing up in SEOmoz or OSE and the domain authority of my client's site has not changed. Why do the links not show? Surely a period of 5 weeks is long enough for these links to be indexed?
Link Building | | mfrgolfgti0 -
Numerous (20K+) inbound links from ONE site in short time period
I'm somewhat new to SEO, but from what I understand, slow link growth can provide better results than highly aggressive link building campaigns. A site of mine was recently featured on a 90+ DA (55 PA) blog directory, and was featured for the entire state, therefore I received almost 20,000 inbound links from the site (from every company/listing in the state). The links have been mostly recorded (17,000) in Google webmaster tools (Yahoo Site Explorer claims around 23,000). However the site dropped 2 pages in rankings for numerous SEO related keywords since webmaster tools listed the links. Many of them are PA 50+, though a majority of the linking pages are PA 1. A few other inbound links were created from other root domains, roughly 8-10 or so in the past month. The question is, would a large amount of links like this all of a sudden trigger some kind of "penalty" from search engines (Google, especially)? And, do the PA 1 pages take away from the quality of the 55 PA links?
Link Building | | Smith-Digital0 -
What are some good easy links to get for new sites?
We are in the process of launching a couple of new sites and while we know it will be a long process to get them to rank, achieving some long-tail keywords would be beneficial. What sites would you recommend for getting some easy links to start with that can help the indexation and ranking process along in the preliminary stages? Or another way to put the question - when you launch a new site, what steps do you go through?
Link Building | | ukss19840 -
What is best way to evaluate external links to my site?
What is the best way to evaluate external links coming in to my site? I have been working on trying to build links by commenting on blogs/forums and adding to directories, etc. I've run link reports through Open Site Explorer and Yahoo and they never seem to show the same links coming in. For example, i run link eport on Open Site Explorer and it will show links coming into my site that Yahoo doesn't show, and vice versa. I guess I'm trying to figure best way to monitor each week new links coming into my site to determine if my efforts are fruitful. Also, is there a certain period of time that should pass from time I put my link on another site (ie, a blog) until it will show up in OPen Site Explorer? Thanks! Oh, and I use the NoDoFollow Add-on for Firefox to only comment on those sites that do follow. Not sure if that's really effective or not.
Link Building | | leonenobleseate0