Affilate Links
-
Hi
I’m looking for confirmation of my worries about affiliate links to a website I'm working for and hopefully get some ideas of how to solve the problem of having affiliates without losing the strength of links from affiliate web sites.
Poplidays.com has an affiliate program with an independant affiliation platform, but it also has a couple of partners who link directly to Poplidays.com from their sites. Poplidays wants to reward the partner sites in the same way as it does affiliates: with a percentage of sales generated by visitors. However as their SEO I don’t want to lose these links. They are from established, quality sites in the same subject area and, in my opinion, have a lot of SEO value.
Affiliate links are 302 redirects from urls on the affiliation platform’s domain; something like http://poplidays.affiliation.com/?clientid=123 to www.poplidays.com
Can you confirm that replacing a direct link to www.poplidays.com with a 302 redirect of this type will be a bad for Poplidays rankings? Any proof of this from a reliable source that I can quote? The affiliation platform is insisting that there is no negative effect and that no one has ever made a remark like mine before.
Any good ideas of how to resolve the problem of rewarding linkers without spoiling the links for SEO? Bearing in mind that Poplidays want to be able to reward sites for visitors who may buy on a later interaction with the site (up to 30-days) and want an automatic report so that the partner can follow his commissions.
I’ve tried implementing something through Google Analytics but it wasn’t perfect.
Your in house affiliation system is working with links like http://go.seomoz.org/aff_c?offer_id=1&aff_id=1624&url_id=1&file_id=24 that 302 to http://www.seomoz.org/features?affid=1624&txnid=10274208218121120514
Is this a better / perfect solution ? Compared to a direct link to http://www.seomoz.org/features ?
Thanks
- Neil
-
If you switch a direct link to a 302 redirected link, you're absolutely going to lose the value of that link.
See this 2010 post on SERoundTable about ways to retain that link value and pass affiliate IDs: http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/022446.html - read the comments on the page as well.
As a sidenote, If I recall correctly, I have seen it indicated either officially or unofficially that Google doesn't 'like' the passing of link value through affiliate links - I think they rightfully consider them a form of paid links.
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
-
Person using expired domain and its links to drive traffic
Hi, I know about people using expired domains to drive juice to their primary site but what about people using AN expired domain as their primary site (totally changing that site into a trashy affiliate-marketing vehicle)? The site I'm looking at is thegunzone.com. It has, according to Semrush, almost 38K links. It used to be a legit 17-year-old firearms hobby site, and this is what it originally looked like: http://web.archive.org/web/20120213184627/http://thegunzone.com:80/ Here is its last page before it closed and the domain purchased by the affiliate marketer: http://web.archive.org/web/20170315084035/http://www.thegunzone.com/ It closed around February of 2017, and some affiliate marketer bought it and all its backlinks. However, all those backlinks, which were previously to various articles, are now directed back to those articles (which don't exist anymore) but the homepage, including Wikipedia links. Here's an example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polygonal_rifling At the bottom, in the 7th Reference, there's a link to an article called " "Learning About Shooting . . ." but if you click on the original link, it just goes to thegunzone.com homepage. Again, the site's totally different. And there are just thousands of such backlinks to former articles that don't exist anymore but are redirected to this schlocky site's homepage (and it's passing its juice through too). My question is this: this cannot be kosher with Google backlinking policies, right? Is this prevalent on the internet? Why hasn't thegunzone.com been found out and its rankings penalized yet? And how do I report him? I see tons of other sites using this basic strategy too on search results with various hunting keywords. (Disclosure: I do own a hunting/firearms blog, but I don't do any backlinking at all.) Any help would be sincerely appreciated.
Affiliate Marketing | | HandyWoman1 -
NoFollow Affiliate links from (very) shady websites will effect rankings?
Should I be worried , and if so what to do, if affiliates are linking from shady / gaming/adult websites? or dost the fact that the links are nofollow solve this issue completely ?
Affiliate Marketing | | KSafer0 -
Before I request hundreds of links for "nofollow" I want to verify I'm doing the right thing
Happy Thanksgiving Mozers, In my efforts to get rid of a Google penalty, I've come to the conclusion that all the travel agents who link to our site with a unique code, are technically affiliates because they get commission. Therefore we need to get all of them to switch their links to "rel=nofollow". I'm worried this shift will cost us in search rankings, especially since none of our competitors require nofollow tags. So before I actually begin requiring the switch, I wanted to just double check that I'm not misinterpreting Google. Our travel agents are paid commission on every sale (whether their customers click the link from their website to ours, or calls in and gives us that agent's code. So even though our travel agents aren't technically part of an "affiliate program" run through CJ or anything, they are in Google's eyes affiliates of my company. Therefore their links with their personal codes all need to be nofollow. Am I correct on this? I can't find anywhere where Google goes into great depth explaining various types of affiliates.
Affiliate Marketing | | Patrick_G0 -
What impact do affiliate links have on SEO
We commonly reference engineering standards on our site (because half our products are known and searched for by those standard names) and have just signed up as an affiliate to an organisation that sell the standards. Which seems a nice match We're going through and making sure all are no follow now because that seems the general advice - but should we be doing anything else? Yoast says you should mask affiliate links - https://yoast.com/affiliate-links-and-seo/ - but that was from 2010. Matt Cutts is fairly clear on nonfollow - http://www.webpronews.com/heres-what-googles-matt-cutts-says-about-affiliate-links-and-nofollow-2012-06 - but not on whether it affects SERPS Does it? And what is the best way to handle it? This is a typical example of a page where we would have an affiliate link or two. http://www.oakleysteel.co.uk/fake-mill-certificates-en10168
Affiliate Marketing | | Zippy-Bungle0 -
What is the best way to boost no. of quality sites linking in?
Analysing my site ranking compared to competitors, I see that our weakness is getting others to share our content and link into it via their own blogs and social media - although I would say our social media activity is pretty good. We have also worked on getting listed free on relevant sites related to our product area (learn spanish in spain) in order to increase sites linking but this is still minute compared to our 2 main competitors. (As a note: paid listings are not totally justifiable for us at this point in time but perhaps in the future we will expand on this). Am I missing something here?
Affiliate Marketing | | sparkit0 -
Links from Blogs and Forums
Hello Everyone, We are a small, local business in a city in Canada. We just got a new website and I am responsible for basically all of it, including the SEO. I was researching the back-links from our top-ranking competitor (another small, local business in our city). Here is their ranking: PA 40, with 441 Links from 111 RDs DA 30, with 6,864 Links from 116 RDs Here is the second-highest guy: PA 29, with 101 Links from 10 RDs DA 15, with 1,682 Links from 11 RDs As you can see, the top-ranking competitor's PA & DA are just about double his closest competitor. (Don't ask where we currently stand!) But, on closer examination, most of the links from our top-ranking competitor come from a local blog, where our competitor's ad appears in an advertisement on the sidebar. Each time they make a post, which is just about every day, our competitor gets a link. They also have a lot of links from a forum on a rock band's website. The original post was something about finding music, but the responses all have links to unrelated websites. This seems really, really slimy to me. What's going on?
Affiliate Marketing | | StillLearning0 -
Does Google look at Domain Registrar owner information when counting links into a site?
Question: If the domain registrar owner info is the same on two websites, will Google/other search engines discredit any linking between the two sites when calculating page rank? We have two company sites. One is our main ecommerce domain which we have been linking into from information domains in the past. We recently cut ties with the company that hosted them for us and wish to host them ourselves to preserve the inbound traffic. We are worried, however, that the traffic will be discredited now that we own both domains. Thanks for looking!
Affiliate Marketing | | tennisexpress0 -
Link exchange
Folks I just thought to myself that this forum must be filled with lovely SEOs who are busy working on multiple clients.... I'm very new to the industry myself... about a month into it 🙂 Any-hoots I was just wondering if anybody is working in a category that may be suitable for a link exchange with http://bluetea.com.au/ .... Please let me know
Affiliate Marketing | | PHDAustralia680