Redirect to Affiliate script via htacces - Is that risky?
-
Hi,
We are offering an affiliate programme to publishers. The problem is that the links to the Affiliate Script are very user-UNfriendly (something like http://scripts.affiliateprogramme....../..../....)
I would like to give them a simple url:
www.website.com/PublishersPage
And then redirect this via HTACCESS to the script link (which would then send them back to us).
Would that be a problem for SEO? for Google?
Thank you for your help.
-
If I understand this correctly, you are the merchant, and you have some affiliate software. Your affiliates will come to your software and get these links to use, which are not clean? You then want the affiliates to have a clean URL to use to link to you?
That's actually done very commonly by many experienced affiliates already. In terms of SEO, most affiliates that I know set their affiliate links to go through a sub directory link like /go or /jump. That directory typically gets blocked in the robots.txt file, so that those links will be completely ignored by spiders - so as a merchant, you'll still get the clicks, but won't get any SEO benefit from doing that.
It really is better if you can just use an affiliate program that gives your affiliates clean links in the first place. The cleaner your links are, the less likely that affiliates will think to cloak the links on their own websites, and use some techniques that reduce any SEO value of those links for you. For your affiliates, the simpler / easier you make it for them - the better results you're going to see from your program.
-
I don't see this being a problem directly. You will have some advantage in the way of citations and links to
www.website.com/PublishersPage from the affiliate websites, but then these links will then redirect to the script via .htaccess and then back to your website.
How many affiliates are we talking ? If you think from the affiliate perspective, they'd like it as well I am guessing because if I am the affiliate, I would love to link to www.website.com/PublishersPage vs http://scripts.affiliateprogramme....../..../....)
Do yes, definitely consider doing it. Your affiliates are going to love it. I don't see a lot of merchants doing this. This is definitely something unique.
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
-
Affiliate Tool For Competitors Analysis
Hello Guys, I'm Looking for an Affiliate Tool where i can see my competitors affiliate publisher. is there any kind of tool which can help me out to find the best publishers of my competitors? Please Suggest. Thanks Damian Martin
Affiliate Marketing | | CommercePundit0 -
Set up affiliates
Hi Mozzers, As a response to Rand's recent (ish!) whiteboad Friday (http://moz.com/blog/my-customers-wont-amplify-my-content-whiteboard-friday) where he talked about how many verticals will never gain much in the way of links because they aren't fun or exciting products/brands. I think my sites fall into this - we sell mortgages! Not the most exciting or sexy of products, but try buying a house without one! With this in mind, I am looking at building an extensive PR campaign, but this will take a fair bit of time to get going. In the meantime, my boss has asked me to find some paid link opportunities. I've been trawling through our main competitor's backlinks like a demon (so much trash in there though, why hasn't Google noticed it yet??) and one of our main competitors looks like they are running an affiliate scheme. I have absolutely no experience in this area. None. Zip. Nothing. I want to change this! And get some good relevant (converting) traffic to my site. I personally think this would be more beneficial than buying links (my boss understands that any paid links I get will have to have nofollow and therefore would be built for traffic) because we'd only pay when we made a sale - right? I think this is the way it works? Anyway, I wanted to know how to become an affiliate? Sorry if I've got the terminology wrong here - like I said before I have zero experience in this. Please can someone point me in the right direction? I've found a few companies that appear to act as the middleman but I have no idea of what is good and what isn't in this area. Steep learning curve for me.... Any knowledge you wish to share with me on this would be greatly appreciated! Thank you 🙂
Affiliate Marketing | | CommT1 -
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 -
Affiliate program links
Hello, I've question regarding affiliate partner generated links.Company www.example.com has a affiliate program. Partner www.example2.com links to the company site with affiliate link www.example.com/?affid=xxxx in banner, article etc. As I understand these type of links could hurt our Company site, so I asked partners to use rel="nofollow" in all links where they link to us usign ?affid=xxxx in url. To be 100% sure that I did the right thing I decided to post here my question. Could these type of links hurt our Company site? Regards,
Affiliate Marketing | | juris_l
Juris0 -
Redirects
I have 302 redirects coming from my pages to other product sites that aren't mine. The crawl report is telling me that this isn't good because it's not passing any link juice to these sites....but why would I want to do that? Don't I predominantly want links passing juice to my site from others?
Affiliate Marketing | | johnkeys0 -
Two Tier Internet, Bad Blogs and One page Affiliate Sites
Hi, I start a post on a popular internet marketing forum about how bad blogs - (i.e. the ones with one posts of over optimise spun garbage) - and the one page affiliate sites - trying to sell you something... (you know the ones) - were REALLY starting to annoy me and if/when something would be done by ISP's or Anyone really. Obviously google is aware of the issue with trying to push Google Plus to crowd source better search results. But with more and more sites popping up telling people how they can make money from having a niche website/page with adwords on it aren't we fast moving to a two tier internet.... How websites/pages exist purely to game search engines.... and will they ever disappear.... Sorry mini rant..... might even get some ideas for a blog post 😛 (not on a bad blog before anyone says anything)
Affiliate Marketing | | JohnW-UK0 -
Promoting an Affiliate Scheme
I have to promote an affiliate scheme, and am drawing up a list of techniques that I can use to get people interested and sign up to it. Currently I have: Promoting the scheme in any article promotion. Identifying relevant websites to the scheme, and contacting them directly. Networking in affiliate forums and communities. Promoting on Facebook and Twitter. Possibly producing a video reviewing the scheme and posting it onto YouTube and other video sites. Can anyone think of any other techniques that I could try using? Cheers.
Affiliate Marketing | | speedyseo0 -
How to use different affiliate link based on geolocalisation in a Seo friendly way ?
Hi All, My website Sportytrader.com http://www.sportytrader.com/ works as an sport betting affiliate website on the french language markets. With sport betting legalisation in Europe, only people from France can play on french sport betting website. The same for Belgium or swiss. We have traffic from everywhere. So we need to geolocalize all our affiliate links to provide the right affiliate link to the right person in function of his location? What is the best way and the more seo friendly way to do that? Thanks a lot, Renaud
Affiliate Marketing | | jarnac0