SEO and Affiliate Links

[stereo69]

Hello,

We run a travel related website and we started to run our own affilate newtwork to promote the sales of our products.

At the moment the affilate links pont to a spacific affilate url in order to tack conversions :

abcweb.com/affiliate/nameqaz

I'm wondering how is the best way to run a private affilate programm considering  SEO:

Is there a way yo benefit from those links ?

What are the best strategies to do this?

If yes, Is there any benefit from redirecting 301 those links to the original page (the one accesible to google and the one we want to rank for)  or is it better to use a king of canonical method.

Thanks a lot for sharing you experiences , giving your opinion and indicate resources.

Best Regards

Daria

[tripsta]

Any update on this so far Daria?

[stereo69]

Thanks for all your good Suggestions. I will do more research now that I have little bit more information on the subject and be back soon.

I hope you will still be around.

[matbennett]

You can track any type of link you like.  Google is good at detecting affiliate links built in common formats or run through big networks. However there are plenty of links around that are part of an affiliate program and totally undetectable by algorithmic means.

One example: I've previously written scripts to track referred sales from the referring domain. No tracking URL was used.

If I was building an affiliate program with the SEO benefit of the links in mind I'd probably use (or at least offer) a method like that.  There is also another trick that I've seen used in the travel sector quite heavily using malformed URLs which I think it slightly more theoretically traceable, but seems to work just fine.

Even simpler I would suggest that most forms that don't go through a known network and don't use an obvious form like &aff_id=xxx or &affiliate=xxx will probably count.

I'd imagine that doing such is pretty much a textbook example of a paid link.  You'd need to consider that and be sure you were happy with such risk. Either way I would strongly disagree with the other comments that affiliate links don't count.  I'd also question the suggestion that affiliates will always nofollow as well.

More pressing I would consider whether you are possibly causing a duplicate content issue with your URL structure.

If abcweb.com/affiliate1/nameqaz and abcweb.com/affiliate2/nameqaz both point to the same page and there is no 301 or canonical in place then you could end up with multiple versions of the same page indexed.  I'd opt for a 301 if you are stuck with that structure which would also help direct the link equity if that is your concern.

Better still I'd pass one (or more) get vars and have these ignored through webmaster tools.  If you were using abcweb.com/nameqaz?rand=111 & abcweb.com/nameqaz?rand=222 and had ?rand ignored in webmaster tools that would solve a couple of issues.

I'm not endorsing everything above as a great tactic for every project. However it is all correct.

[RebekahMay]

As Gamer07 said, Google is pretty good at detecting these, so many the affiliate links themselves should not give much SEO benefit.  However incorrect implementation could lead to issues with duplicate content.

If you are going to send your affiliate links through a different directory than the main page - such as /affiliate/ then you should make sure that you block this directory with robots.txt - as an extra precaution I would add canonical URLs to the page since you cannot guarantee all incoming links will be no-followed.

Personally, I think the best method would be to use the one main page that you direct both visitors and affiliates to and then add a hashtag (#) to the URL for affiliates and include their affiliate ID after that.

• Edited portion of last paragraph (left out a word) and corrected spelling error

[Gamer07]

As far as I know, Google is pretty good at detecting affiliate links and most affiliate marketers add "nofollow" to those links anyway. So you won't receive any link juice with those affiliate links.

I see some of the affiliate programs prefer to use seperate domains for affiliate links and then some others use their own domain name.