Do affiliate links count for Google?

[jorgediaz]

Hi, I have been reading about affiliate links - links with a tracking code in the URL (i.e.: www.xxx.com/?aff=123456) and I can't find a definitive answer. Does Google count them as natural links or maybe they do not even pass any link juice?

And if they don't, what if I get a natural link from a website (without tracking code) and later that website becomes my affiliate? Would the first link still count?

I guess that there can't be any certainty about all this, but I would love to know your expert opinions

Thanks!

[StalkerB]

Again, not totally clear cut. Depends if the links are within the content, site wide, above or below an affiliate link, withing one or several pages.

I would err on the side of assuming that if there's affiliate and non-affiliate links then the clean links won't count for as much.

[jorgediaz]

Wow! Thanks for this answer! But I still have one doubt: if an affiliate gives me a mix of affiliate links and clean links, would the clean links still count?

[StalkerB]

Fairly complex to get decent value out of affiliate links and technically I believe Google wants you to nofollow affiliate links, so gaming them for more positive SEO value could wind up with you getting in a little trouble.

The blog post Atul linked to is a good place to start, however I think if you were really serious about it there's a lot more depth you can go into.

In your example you can start by ignoring the aff parameter in webmaster tools and I assume you'll canonicalise the page.

It's possible to get affiliates to give you a clean link, then drop a cookie on users based on the referral header. This has the advantage of requiring no work on the affiliates side (they simply link to anywhere on your site as normal) but it's very easy to game for other affiliates. If there's money to be made a lot of people are going to take advantage of it. A variation on this is you can use # links and then interpret them server side (so affiliate links to example.com#aff=123456 convert to example.com/?aff=123456). Again that's game-able.

A possibility would be to set up affiliate landing pages that override cookies (a force vs a default), so that affiliates can link into this page cleanly and visitors get cookied at that stage. You would then have a stripped down navigation to sections of your site you most wanted to promote. You'd have to make this page accessible to search engines though, which means there's a possibility of that page showing in SERPS. On the other hand it could also give you a chance to be in the SERPS for their brand if you do it right

Another, somewhat dodgy (all right, actually dodgy), thing you can do is look at a list of your affiliates and see who's not bringing in many sales, especially those with high traffic. You can then offer to match or beat their affiliate payments for their continued endorsement with a clean link.

Assuming you manage to impliment a decent solution something you'll need to overcome is that affiliates are increasingly masking their affiliate links to keep the link juice. See this post for an example - http://yoast.com/affiliate-links-and-seo/ - though it's possible to do the same thing without the plugin. No real solution to this beyond interacting with the affiliate and discussing it with them.

Also affiliates may not be too happy about providing SEO friendly links as it makes it harder for them to rank/earn. One solution could be to offer additional rewards for SEO friendly links over traditional links.

A small negative to solving this if you have a widespread affiliate program is that you could suddenly have a lot of low value links pointing into you, diluting to a degree some of your stronger links. I'm not saying that getting a whole bunch of links could ever be bad, per se, but, depending on your niche, I still think some affiliates operate in 'bad neighbourhoods'. I wouldn't worry about it too much, but if possible roll these links out instead of flipping a switch.

The only real concern is if you then revert or change your affiliate program. I'm 95% sure Google doesn't care if you pick up a whole bunch of links quickly, but if you LOSE a whole bunch of links quickly you're going to set off some alarm bells. Although I could be significantly overthinking your question, just the sort of things that go through my mind

If I think of anything else I'll update.

[seoug_2005]

There is a post at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/getting-seo-value-from-your-affiliate-links

This should be helpful.