Can Affiliate Links Harm Your Rank?
-
Does Google interpret Affiliate links as paid links?
If so, can Affiliate links harm your rank if they are not properly tagged with a no-follow?
Thanks.
-
What if the affiliate links are follow but they go to an specific subdomain which disallows robots via robots.txt.
Can those kind of links hurt the main domain?
Thanks in advanced.
Jabi
-
Interesting. I didn't know anything about this - affecting the sender and receiver. I'll do some more digging. Thanks for shedding light on this for me.
-
It depends on how the affiliate links are set up. Let's say your affilaites using a tracking parameter (like "affiliate="). Now, you link them to a product page, such as:
You could end up with a bunch of indexed pages...
www.example.com/product1.php?affiliate=1
www.example.com/product1.php?affiliate=2
...etc. Those would all be seen as duplicates. Again, I'm only speaking in generalities. I don't know how your links are currently set up.
-
Hi Dr. Meyers. Thanks for the note and the link. I understand the first part of your response. However, I don't fully undertand the second part. How will an incoming affiliate link create duplicate content for me (the recipient of the link)?
-
It's less common than when you're using obvious paid links, but there is some amount of risk. It really depends on how strong and diverse your link profile is. If you're talking a relatively small percentage, it's probably ok. If the majority of your links are affiliate links, it could look shady to Google. It depends on the nature of the links, the industry, etc. too.
The other issue is that affiliate links can often create duplicate content issues, so it can make sense to consolidate them (usually, with canonical tags or 301-redirects). That's a separate issue, though.
You might find this post from Joost de Valk interesting:
http://yoast.com/affiliate-links-and-seo/
Edit: A couple more posts - it's a complex topic:
http://www.darrinward.com/blog/seo/google-penalty-nofollow-affiliate-links
http://www.wolf-howl.com/affiliate-marketing/how-to-mask-affiliate-links/
-
I have never heard of anything bad connected with affiliate links.
I have seen at least 2 websites that use affiliate marketing and they are doing good.
- <cite>www.undergroundtraininglab.com/</cite>
- <cite>www.ultimatewowguide.com/</cite>
Both these sites even have sitelinks.
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
-
Same page Anchor Links vs Internal Link (Cannibalisation)
Hey Mozzers, I have a very long article page that supports several of my sub-category pages. It has sub-headings that link out to the relevant pages. However the article is very long and to make it easier to find the relevant section I was debating adding inpage anchor links in a bullet list at the top of the page for quick navigation. PAGE TITLE Keyword 1 Keyword 2 etc <a name="'Keyword1"></a> Keyword 1 Content
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ATP
<a name="'Keyword2"></a> Keyword 2 Content Because of the way my predecessor wrote this article, its section headings are the same as the sub-categories they link out to and boost (not ideal but an issue I will address later). What I wondered is if having the inpage achor would confuse the SERPS because they would be linking with the same keyword. My worry is that by increasing userbility of the article by doing this I also confuse them SERPS First I tell them that this section on my page talk about keyword 1. Then from in that article i tell them that a different page entirely is about the same keyword. Would linking like this confuse SERPS or are inpage anchor links looked upon and dealt with differently?0 -
980 links from 75 domains and Graded "A" on Moz Page Grader-- still not ranking for our term. Thoughts?
A few additional interesting details: A blog post we wrote with the same keyword ranks 8, but this page does not crack the top 20. Crazy competitive term-- top SERP are from HBR, Entrepreneur and Inc. We use Instapage as landing page builder-- could this effect our rankings? URL is not a subdomain Pretty stumped over here. Thanks y'all!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lbernes220 -
Homepage not ranking for main keyword, all other pages ranking slightly for their own keyword phrases.
Dear Mozzers, We have an ecommerce website (www.pashmina-boutique.com), we want to rank the homepage for the keyword "pashmina". Problem is, we are nowhere to be found, not even in the top 100 search results of Google. It is indexed, we have no crawl errors, except that we had some problems with our hosting (503's), the crawler of Google bumped in a few of those. And we are fixing it. Our other pages, e.g. (http://www.pashmina-boutique.com/15-white-pashminas) ranks for "white pashminas" 24th and "white cashmere pashminas" 23rd. We have done no linkbuilding, in Majestic, you can check that. We have been offline for a long time (over 6 months) and about 3 weeks ago, we did a redesign (SEO). We relaunched, everything is looking fine except the homepage isn't ranking for the main keyword. Could you guys check it out? Is it over-optimization? It can't be Penguin, Panda would be a surprise too. Or do we still have to wait for the monthly Panda data-refresh? We are currently busy with this issue, once this is solved - that the homepage is ranking - we will start linkbuilding. Mr.1000
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mr.10000 -
Link Building
I have to develop a strategy for link building. The SEO guy I have been speaking with has started putting links on .edu sites etc . To me - this "stinks" of manipulating the search engines - which I know we will get stung by at some point. I hope this isn't standard practice - but I don't know what the best way to improve rankings in terms of links etc. We sell health products and are starting to put out 3-4 high quality articles per week. Ideas? Kind Regards Martin
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | s_EOgi_Bear1 -
Link earning for local businesses who can't afford content marketing
What are some of the best ways to earn and build quality relevant links that will increase exposure to your target market in addition to assisting search rankings? I personally find that local niche directories and PR are the best ways to accomplish this without having content to "earn links"..what else works? Any interesting ideas??
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RickyShockley0 -
Ranking
Hi All, I have been working on a car insurance site which targets US market. we have been doing all types of links to the site like - good related directory links, related blogpost and reviews. the site is updated daily with a fresh unique content. what more is needed to get it to the first page. we are currently ranking in the range of 40 - 50 on the page 4 or page 5. we have also recently done a redesign with a new cms, done a good press release but not seeing much of changes. please if anyone in the same industry or with some experience can suggest us. we are using all white hat seo & I can understand the amount of competition in this niche. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Markyseo0 -
Can 404 Errors Be Affecting Rankings
I have a client that we recently (3 months ago) designed, developed, and launch a new site at a "new" domain. We set up redirects from the old domain to the new domain and kept an eye on Google Webmaster Tools to make sure the redirects were working properly. Everything was going great, we maintained and improved the rankings for the first 2 months or so. In late January, I started noticing a great deal of 404 errors in Webmaster Tools for URLs from the new site. None of these URLs were actually on the current site so I asked my client if he had previously used to domain. It just so happens that he used the domain a while back and none of the URLs were ever redirected or removed from the index. I've been setting up redirects for all of the 404s appearing in Webmaster tools but we took a pretty decent hit in rankings for February. Could those errors (72 in total) been partially if not completely responsible for the hit in rankings? All other factors have been constant so that lead me to believe these errors were the culprits.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheOceanAgency0 -
Link Platform Diversity? Did you get slapped rankings?
I have been working on a few clients websites and have recently had rankings plummet. Most of the links i get are coming from wordpress platform(blog posts), in the past it worked very well, has anyone else had a problem with just using wordpress platform i.e most of the links are coming from blogs......and had rankings drop?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | foreignhaus0