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
-
Inbound Affiliate Links: can this solution help?
Hello everyone, I have a pretty large e-commerce website and a bunch (about 1,000) affiliates using our in-house affiliate system we built several years ago (about 12 years ago?). All our affiliates link to us as follows: http://mywebsite.com/page/?aff=[aff_nickname] Then our site parses the request, stores a cookie to track the user, then 301 redirects to the clean page URL below: http://mywebsite.com/page/ Since 2013 we require all affiliates to link to us by using the rel="nofollow" tag to avoid any penalties, but I still see a lot of affiliate links not using the nofollow or old affiliates that have not updated their pages. So... I was reading on this page from Google, that any possible "scheme" penalization can be fixed by using either the nofollow tag or by using an intermediate page listed on the robots.txt file: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66356?hl=en Do you think that could really be a reliable solution to avoid any possible penalization coming from affiliate links not using the "nofollow" tag? I have searched and read around the web but I couldn't find any real answer to my question. Thanks in advance to anyone. Best, Fab.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau0 -
Domain switch planned - new domain accessible - until the switch: redirect from new to old domain with 307?
Hi there, We are going to switch our local domain oldsite.at to newsite.com in November. As our IT department wants to use the newsite.com already for email traffic till then, the domain newsite.com has to be accessible for public and currently shows the default Apache page without useful content. The old domain has quite some trust, the new domain is a first time registered domain (not known by search engines yet and no published anyhow). The domain was parked till now. I am aware of the steps to take for the switch itself, but: **what to do with the newsite.com domain until everything is prepared for the switch? **I suppose users or search engines find the domain and as there is no useful information available it harms us already. My idea was to 307 redirect newsite.com to the oldsite.at but the concern is that this causes problems as soon as we switch the domain and redirecting with 301 from oldsite.at to newsite.com? Do you have any objections or other recommendations? Thank you a lot in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | comicron0 -
Recommended link removal contractors?
Looking for recommendations for a reliable & experienced contractor to help with a link cleanup project. We've identified the problem links, we just need someone to assist with the actual outreach. Would appreciate any suggestions.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MattBarker0 -
PR links
Its seems that at lot of or competitors are using PR site to place articles with links. They are using the same article across many sites with the same anchor text link - But they seem to be doing very well in the rankings.... I have steered away from this type of linking as I assumed Google wouldn't be keen on this type of activity but I seem to be wrong.... Any views on this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jj34340 -
Toxic Links; Their Existence and Their Impact..
We are constantly being asked about the existence of “toxic Links” and that they are damaging the sites of our clients. Apparently, this definition is being pushed down the throats of clients by other “Seo experts” trying to hijack our business. At this point in time, clients can easily be swayed as a reflex reaction to a drop in rankings. These so called “Seo experts” are clearly scaremongering for their own gain but I would be grateful for your opinion about whether automated, spun content from Seolinkvine and the like, where the English may not be perfect (I assume this is what is meant by “toxic Links”) can actually damage a client’s site. Is it not more constructive to concentrate resources on dilution of keywords from the anchor text rather than waste time on links that may no longer be as powerful, or do they actually have a negative effect?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Dexter-2455780 -
Linking Back
Hello, I have a blog www.digitaldiscovery.eu and I have been working the link building. Now I have a few links pointing into my blog and in Google Webmaster and in Open Site Explorer I can see the URL of those websites. In scale from 1 to 10 how usefull is to have a blogroll in my blog pointing back to those high PR links? How usefull is this in link-building strategy? Tks in advance! PP
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PedroM0 -
Dynamic Links vs Static Links
There are under 100 pages that we are trying to rank for and we'd like to flatten our site architecture to give them more link juice. One of the methods that is currently in place now is a widget that dynamically links to these pages based on page popularity...the list of links could change day to day. We are thinking of redesigning the page to become more static, as we believe it's better for link juice to flow to those pages reliably than dynamically. Before we do so, we need a second opinion.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RBA0 -
Seasonal links, seasonal ranks
As the garden season begins to wane I notice yet again how my ranking for some garden specific terms - eg ' garden tealight holders' start to rise again.Since I am doing nothing much I can only assume that my competitors have moved their focus to more winter based merchandise. Does anyone have a good understanding of how some websites are able to acheive high rankings during peak season only? I am assuming they are buying advertising (with the follow) for say 3 months before the season peak and manipulating internal linking to direct link juice from one section of the website to the other. Is this strategy risky. Has Google ever made mention of this issue?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GardenBeet0
