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
-
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 -
More bad links
Hi, After a recent disastrous dalliance with a rogue SEO company I disavowed quite a few domains (links he had gained) which I was receiving a penalty of about 23 places. I cleaned up the site and added meta descriptions where missing, and deleted duplicate titles and pages. This gained me another 5 places. In the meantime I have been getting a few links from wedding blogs, adobe forums and other relevant sites so was expecting an upward momentum. Since the high point of bottom of page 1 I have slowly slid back down to near the bottom of page two for my main keywords. Just checked my webmaster tools latest links and another 4 domains have appeared (gained by the dodgy SEO) : domain:erwinskee.blog.co.uk domain:grencholerz.blog.co.uk domain:valeriiees.blog.co.uk domain:gb.bizin.eu They all look bad so I am going to disavow. I expect to find an improvement when I disavow these new domains. As I have said, have started using the open site explorer tool to check my competitors backlinks and getting some low level links(I'm a wedding photographer) like forum comments and blog comments and good directories. I know there is much more than this to SEO and plan on raising my game as time progresses. I have also gained more links from the domains I disavowed on the 8th January mostly from www.friendfeed.com. will webmaster tools ignore any new links from previously disavowed domains? Like I have said I know there are better ways to get links, but are these links (forum comments, blog comments and respectable directories) one way of raising my rankings? To be honest that is all my competitors have got other than some of the top boys might have a photograph or two on another site with a link. No-one has a decent article or review anywhere (which is my next stage of getting links). Thanks! David.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WallerD0 -
Lower quality new domain link vs higher quality repeat domain link
First time poster here with a dilemma that head scratching and spreadsheets can't solve! I'm trying to work out whether to focus on getting links from new domains or to nurture relationships with the bigger sites in our business and get more links. Of the two links below which does the community here think would be more valuable a signal to Google? Both would be links from within relevant text/post copy. Link 1. Site DA 30. No links currently from this domain. Link 2. Site DA 60. Many links over last 12 months already from this domain. I suspect link 1 but given the enormous disparity in ranking power am I correct?! Thanks for any considered opinions out there! Matthew
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mat20150 -
Google penalized site--307/302 redirect to new site-- Via intermediate link—New Site Ranking Gone..?
Hi, I have a site that google had placed a manual link penalty on, let’s call this our
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Robdob2013
company site. We tried and tried to get the penalty removed, and finally gave up and purchased another name. It was our understanding that we could safely use either a 302 or 307 temporary redirect in order to redirect people from our old domain to our new one.. We put this into place several months and everything seemed to be going along well. Several days ago I noticed that our root domain name had dropped for our selected keyword from position 9 to position 65. Upon looking into our GWT under “Links to Your site” , I have found many, many, many links which were pointed to our old google penalized domain name to our new root domain name each of this links had a sub heading “Via this intermediate link -> Our Old Domain Google Penalized Domain Name” In light of all of this going on, I have removed the 307/302 redirect, have brought the
old penalized site back which now consists of a basic “we’ve moved page” which is linked to our new site using a rel=’nofollow’ I am hoping that -1- Our new domain has probably not received a manual penalty and is most likely now
received some sort of algorithmic penalty, and that as these “intermediate links” will soon disappear because I’m no longer doing the 302/307 from the old sight to the new. Do you think this is the case now or that I now have a new manual penalty place on the new
domain name.. I would very much appreciate any comments and/or suggestions as to what I should or can do to get this fixed. I need to still keep the old domain name as this address has already been printed on business cards many, many years ago.. Also on a side note some of the sub pages of the new root domain are still ranking very
well, it’s only the root domain that is now racking awfully.. Thanks,0 -
Compare the rankings
Hi All, I have an example 2 domains are targeting the same keyword, one of them ranks higher then another. Here is the image from OSE http://www.freeimagehosting.net/udq2f Would you be able to tell ( based on the image )which of the domains is winning , "domain 1" or "domain2" and what exactly the " looser " should do to improve its rankings Rgds Webdeal
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Webdeal0 -
My warning report says I have too many on page links - 517! I can't find 50% of them but my q is about no follow
if we put 'no follow' on some of these links does that mean the search engines won't index the no follow pages even if those pages are linked to from elsewhere? no link juice will flow from the page with the (no follow) links on? Just trying to understand why my rankings have dropped so dramatically in the last 6 weeks or so since we redesigned the site, and it might be that now we have too many links on the homepage. This is the page http://www.suffolktouristguide.com/ All suggestions appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SarahinSuffolk0 -
Do I have any harmful links? If so, what should I do?
URL in question: www.nasserilegal.com/criminal.html I'm using OSE and see some questionable backlinks. At first glance, if you look at the page authority and domain authority, they look great. Once you go to the actual pages, they look spammy. If the links are hurting the rankings for the site, should I try to remove the links manually or just ignore and continue to build good quality links or even build a new site? I noticed for the last couple of weeks, the rankings started to slip. Thanks in Advance, Lucas
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | micasalucasa0 -
Link anchor text: only useful for pages linked to directly or distributed across site?
As a SEO I understand that link anchor text for the focus keyword on the page linked to is very important, but I have a question which I can not find the answer to in any books or blogs, namely: does inbound anchor text 'carry over' to other pages in your site, like linkjuice? For instance, if I have a homepage focusing on keyword X and a subpage (with internal links to it) focusing on keyword Y. Does is then help to link to the homepage with keyword Y anchor texts? Will this keyword thematically 'flow through' the internal link structure and help the subpage's ranking? In a broader sense: will a diverse link anchor text profile to your homepage help all other pages in your domain rank thematically? Or is link anchor text just useful for the direct page that is linked to? All views and experiences are welcome! Kind regards, Joost van Vught
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JoostvanVught0