Affiliate links
-
I have a wordpress blog and was wondering the best seo practice for doing affiliate link redirects?
Peter
-
Was just about to ask the same question
-
Hello Peter,
Best practice is to avoid looking like a thin affiliate site. That means making the content very useful and unique, obviously, but also linking out via non-affiliate links to other resources as well. In situations where you have several followable links going out to high-quality, trustworthy sites about the topic I have not found it necessary to hide or redirect affiliate links. I used to advise putting the js that controlled the redirect into an external .js file within a /script folder and then blocking that folder, but have found that Google still executes the javascript (they have to or they wouldn't be able to navigate half the sites out there) even if the file is blocked.
However, if your site is mostly affiliate links (like a review site) and you don't feel comfortable with, or don't have time, to link out to trusted resources and create unique, useful content that provides a lot of value, then I would recommend going ahead and using some type of redirect script. In my opinion you'd be better off going with an ad management tool of some sort over an known affiliate redirect script or plugin, which may raise a red flag right away.
Long story short: There is nothing wrong with sending links through a redirect first if you want to track the clicks and other metrics. I just wouldn't use a tool called "affiliate cloaking script" or something like that.
Good luck.
-
sorry there seems to be some confusion. I don't mean backlinks, I mean affiliate links... like www.affiliateprogram.com/userid?peterm22
-
I'd have to agree with this - content is king for attracting back links. 8 )
-
Hi Peter; my best shot is: focus on your blog´s content and not your affiliate links. Wordpress is a great tool to do that!
Once you have great contents, people will start to back-link to you
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
-
Links in Webmaster Tools that aren't really linking to us
I've noticed that there is a domain in WMT that Google says is linking to our domain from 173 different pages, but it actually isn't linking to us at all on ANY of those pages. The site is a business directory that seems to be automatically scraping business listings and adding them to hundreds of different categories. Low quality crap that I've disavowed just in case. I have hand checked a bunch of the pages that WMT is reporting with links to us by viewing source, but there's no links to us. I've also used crawlers to check for links, but they turn up nothing. The pages do, however, mention our brand name. I find this very odd that Google would report links to our site when there isn't actually links to our site. Has anyone else ever noticed something like this?
Technical SEO | | Philip-DiPatrizio0 -
Do I need a link to my sitemap?
I have a very large sitemap. I submit it to both Google and Bing, but do I need a link to it? If someone went there it would probably lock their browser. Is there any danger of not having a link if I submit it to Google and Bing?
Technical SEO | | EcommerceSite0 -
Too many on page links
Yes this question again. I know it get's asked a lot and I know of a few fixes, but this one I'm having a problem with. So we have a fan gallery on our site which is not only causing duplicate page titles, which I'm thinking we can fix with a canonical, but also too many on page links. The issue is this is on drupal which I have very little experience with and it seems to just be located within the fan galleries section of the site. After looking at a few things I know that no-follow wont be an option since from what I read it wont really work anyway so I was wondering if anyone else has an asnwer. I just read through a million articles trying to find a simular situation and can't seem to find anyone with the same thing. It might have something to do with the plugins the programmers used, but my inexperience with drupal is making this difficult. Thanks guys.
Technical SEO | | KateGMaker0 -
Added data to links
Hello I am in the process of cleaning a site and getting less pages cached. it is a magento site and I was wondering what is your advice fo pages that get this padded to the link ?material=139&price=10%2C12 accept the obvious canonical? thanks
Technical SEO | | ciznerguy0 -
Too Many On Page LInk
The analysis of my site is showing that I have a problem with too many on-page links. Most of this is due to our menu, and wanting users to be able to quickly get to the shopping category they are looking for. We end up with over 200 links in order to get the menu we want. How are other people dealing with a robust menu, but avoiding getting dinged for too many links? One of our pages in question is: http://www.milosport.com/category/2176-snowboards.aspx
Technical SEO | | dantheriver0 -
Track outbound links
I would like to track outbound links at http://bit.ly/yYHmbf 1. Shall i add the following code before at the above page What does 100 means in above code ? 2. Then use this for each outgoing link ``` [onClick="recordOutboundLink(this, 'Outbound Links', 'example.com');return false;">](http://www.example.com) ``` [](http://www.example.com) ```[``` http://www.example.com is the outbound link Am i right on both counts ? where should i look for report in GA ? ```](http://www.example.com)
Technical SEO | | seoug_20050 -
Sitemap with links and images together
Hi there, my e-commerce platform (Magento with "Mageworx SEO Enterprise" plugin) is generating an sitemap.xml that mix text (links) and images, and the result is something like that: <url><loc>http://www.e-lustre.com.br/abajur/abajur-keops</loc>
Technical SEO | | e-Lustre
<lastmod>2011-04-10</lastmod>
<changefreq>daily</changefreq>
<priority>1.0</priority>
image:imageimage:lochttp://www.e-lustre.com.br/catalog/product/image/size/250x250/e/-/e- lustre_mantra_0030_grande.jpg</image:loc></image:image></url> WebmasterTools accepts it, but recognize it as an image sitemap. Have you seen that kind of sitemap, and most important, do you think that's a problem ? Full file: http://www.e-lustre.com.br/sitemap.xml0 -
Should I have a 'more' button for links?
I have a website that has a page for each town. rather than listing all the towns with a link to each, I want to show only the most popular towns and have a 'more' button that shows all of them when you click it. I know that the search engine can always see the full list of links and even though the visitor can't this doesn't go against Google guidelines because there is no deception involved, the more button is quite clear. However, my colleague is concerned that this is 'making life hard' for the search engines and so the pages are less likely to be indexed. I disagree. Is he right to worry about this??
Technical SEO | | mascotmike0