Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Switching to masked affiliate links
-
Hi there,
I run a content affiliate website where I introduce products in articles and then link to merchants where the user can buy the respective product. Currently I am using regular affiliate links here with the "nofollow" attribute.
With growing size of the site, I would like to switch to masked affiliate links, so instead of a link like "jdoqocy.com/click-123" I want to use "mydomain.com/recommend/123".
My question here is: When switching to masked affiliate links, does it makes sense to also convert all the older unmasked affiliate links? If yes, what would be the best way to do that - Convert all old links at once or convert them over time (e.g. over a few month)?
Currently about 2/3 of my site's outbound links are unmasked, external affiliate links. So I am afraid that changing this relatively large share of links from unmasked external affiliate links to masked links doenst look natural at all...
Thank you for your advice!
-
Hi Steve,
thanks for your advice! Yes, one reason for masking is URL vanity. The other one is to increase CTR.
-
The first question is why do you want to mask them? To hide the destination from search engines? If that's the reason, it won't work, because they can easily follow your redirects. If you're just doing it for URL vanity, then I don't think it would hurt, but maybe you should just transition the newer ones over time so you don't have a massive change all at once.
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
-
Rel=canonical and internal links
Hi Mozzers, I was musing about rel=canonical this morning and it occurred to me that I didnt have a good answer to the following question: How does applying a rel=canonical on page A referencing page B as the canonical version affect the treatment of the links on page A? I am thinking of whether those links would get counted twice, or in the case of ver-near-duplicates which may have an extra sentence which includes an extra link, whther that extra link would count towards the internal link graph or not. I suspect that google would basically ignore all the content on page A and only look to page B taking into account only page Bs links. Any thoughts? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | unirmk0 -
If I nofollow outbound external links to minimize link juice loss > is it a good/bad thing?
OK, imagine you have a blog, and you want to make each blog post authoritative so you link out to authority relevant websites for reference. In this case it is two external links per blog post, one to an authority website for reference and one to flickr for photo credit. And one internal link to another part of the website like the buy-now page or a related internal blog post. Now tell me if this is a good or bad idea. What if you nofollow the external links and leave the internal link untouched so all internal links are dofollow. The thinking is this minimizes loss of link juice from external links and keeps it flowing through internal links to pages within the website. Would it be a good idea to lay off the nofollow tag and leave all as do follow? or would this be a good way to link out to authority sites but keep the link juice internal? Your thoughts are welcome. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Rich_Coffman0 -
Linking to URLs With Hash (#) in Them
How does link juice flow when linking to URLs with the hash tag in them? If I link to this page, which generates a pop-over on my homepage that gives info about my special offer, where will the link juice go to? homepage.com/#specialoffer Will the link juice go to the homepage? Will it go nowhere? Will it go to the hash URL above? I'd like to publish an annual/evergreen sort of offer that will generate lots of links. And instead of driving those links to homepage.com/offer, I was hoping to get that link juice to flow to the homepage, or maybe even a product page, instead. And just updating the pop over information each year as the offer changes. I've seen competitors do it this way but wanted to see what the community here things in terms of linking to URLs with the hash tag in them. Can also be a use case for using hash tags in URLs for tracking purposes maybe?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MiguelSalcido0 -
URL Value: Menu Links vs Body Content Links
Hi All, I'm a little confused. I have read a number of articles from authority sites that give mixed signals over the importance of menu links vs body content links. It is suggested that whilst all menu links spread link juice equally, Google does not see them as favourably. Inserting a link within the body will add more link juice value to the desired page. Any thoughts would be appreciated. Thanks Mark
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mark_Ch0 -
Google Indexing Feedburner Links???
I just noticed that for lots of the articles on my website, there are two results in Google's index. For instance: http://www.thewebhostinghero.com/articles/tools-for-creating-wordpress-plugins.html and http://www.thewebhostinghero.com/articles/tools-for-creating-wordpress-plugins.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+thewebhostinghero+(TheWebHostingHero.com) Now my Feedburner feed is set to "noindex" and it's always been that way. The canonical tag on the webpage is set to: rel='canonical' href='http://www.thewebhostinghero.com/articles/tools-for-creating-wordpress-plugins.html' /> The robots tag is set to: name="robots" content="index,follow,noodp" /> I found out that there are scrapper sites that are linking to my content using the Feedburner link. So should the robots tag be set to "noindex" when the requested URL is different from the canonical URL? If so, is there an easy way to do this in Wordpress?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sbrault740 -
Outbound Links to Authority sites
Will outbound links to a related topic on an authority site help, hurt or be irrelevanent for SEO purposes. And if beneficially, should it be Nofollow?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VictorVC0 -
Are duplicate links on same page alright?
If I have a homepage with category links, is it alright for those category links to appear in the footer as well, or should you never have duplicate links on one page? Can you please give a reason why as well? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dkamen0 -
Link Age as SEO factor?
Hi Guys
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VividLime
I have a client who ranks well within a competitive sector of the travel industry. They are planning CMS move which will involve changing from .cfm to .aspx We will be doing the standard redirects etc However Matt's statement here on 301 redirects got me thinking
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zW5UL3lzBOA&t=0m24s He says that basically you loose a bit of page rank when you do a 301 redirect. Now, we will be potentially redirecting 1000s of links and my thinking is 'a lot of a little, adds up to a lot' In other words, 1000s of redirects may have a big enough impact to loose some rankings in a very competitive and aggressive space. So recommended that we contact the sites who has the link highest value and ask them to manually change the links from cfm to aspx. This will then mean that there are no loss value as with a 301 redirect. -But now I have another dilemma which I'm unsure about. So the main question:
Is link age factor in rankings ? If I update any links, this will make said link new to Google, so if link age is a factor, would this also lessen the value passed initially?0
