Incoming affiliate links: is it better to follow or nofollow?
-
Hello here,
this question is from a merchant stand point, and here is a typical scenario: this merchant has thousand of affiliate incoming links. Affiliates link to specific product pages with their affiliate ID passed as a parameter as:
http://www.merchantsite.com/products/product_page/?affid=[affiliate_id]
and users get 301 redirected to a clean URL like:
http://www.merchantsite.com/products/product_page/
after that a cookie is stored into the user's browser for tracking purposes.
Now, my question is the following: is for the merchant more convenient to have its affiliates linking with follow or nofollow links? Is that actually relevant? What are the pros and cons?
Thank you in advance for any insights!
-
Thank you Everett, that makes sense and I will do that indeed!
Thank you again very much for all your help guys.
Best,
Fabrizio
-
Hello Fabrizo,
That I know of, having too many nofollow links will not harm your site - other than there being fewer followable links, and thus less pagerank.
These links have commercial intent. Someone is getting compensated for linking to you, which means they should be nofollowed if you wish to stay within Google's Webmaster Guidelines. Nobody can make the risk Vs reward decision for you, but it does seem that penalties are getting more and more difficult to come out of. It could ruin a business if the website was penalized or filtered for months - even years - as a result of an algorithm update designed to crack down on followable affiliate links.
With that being said, you could always approach your highest trusted affiliates (good website, great content, links mixed into the content in a natural way) and offer them a higher commission rate for being such good affiliates. Of course, that would be a good reason to provide them with new link code, at which point you could take Naku's excellent advice on running them (via 301) through another site that allows you to sever the redirect at any time in case you need to clean up your link profile. You would of course need to notify the affiliates if you ever decide to do that since they worked hard to produce the content and add the links, only to have them 404 some day.
-
Thank you Nakul, I agree with you and I will do that way! I have my last concern here: may having an high number of incoming nofollow links be a problem? I mean, if I have much more incoming "nofollow" links vs "follow" compared with my competitors, may be that an issue? From the SEOmoz Competitive Link Analysis tool I already see my incoming link profile having much more nofollow links than my competitors... I am still figuring out if that's actually a problem or not!
This last question will close my research here.
Thank you again very much.
-
You are 100% right. That's it. The concern is having 100's of thousands of links that would be very very low quality links. The affiliate link pattern will make it "sort of okay" if you decide to keep them follow. Those links are there for the affiliate tracking, but typically the majority of the web uses some sort of an affiliate tracking site like GAN (Which is closing down), CJ, Linkshare etc. Considering that, is it really worth the risk of having that many number of links ? Maybe, maybe not. And that's the business decision you need to make.
The affiliate traffic and sales is important (which justifies the affiliate program). Your natural SEO rankings (current and future rankability) helps you justify the importance of these kinds of decisions and which is why you are asking this question.
We just need to find the right balance without tripping too much on either side.
-
Thank you Nakul. May I ask you what are the reasons to use a nofollow? Is that just to avoid any possible penalization? And here is my natural question: by doing that, will I lose any possible link juice coming currently from my affiliates? Or do you think that I am not getting that anyway?
Thank you again!
-
I'd suggest using a rel="nofollow" in the link to you.
-
Thank you for your reply.
The website I am talking about is my main website virtualsheetmusic.com
I have several hundreds of affiliates that have integrated our data feed on their own website, and so we may have thousands of incoming links from each affiliate. We have our in-house affiliate program and despite we can apply a URL shortener as you are suggesting, that would take a long time to have all the affiliates update their own websites. But that's a great idea we could start deploying soon! Would you suggest to use a 301 redirect there too?
Despite that, what about my original follow-nofollow question? In my current situation, what can I tell my affiliates to do: follow or nofollow?
Thanks!
-
Fabrizo
How big is your natural link profile ? How many affiliate links are we talking ? Do you get a lot of natural links ? Is this your own affiliate program ? Can you do some sort of a link shortener of your own ? EG:
http://www.MSLink.com/whatever/?affid=[affiliate_id]
that redirects to
http://www.merchantsite.com/products/product_page/?affid=[affiliate_id]
which then further redirects to your product page.
This way if there are future problems, you can change/remove the redirects from MSLink.com if they happen to be hurting you anytime in the future while maintaining full control.
I hope this helps.
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
-
HTTPs to HTTP Links
Hi Mozers, I have a question about the news that Google Chrome will start blocking mixed content starting in December 2019. That starting in December 2019, users that are presented insecure content will be presented a toggle allowing those Chrome users to unblock the insure resources that Chrome is blocking. And in January 2020, Google will remove that toggle option an will just start blocking mixed content or insecure web pages. Not sure what this means. What are the implications of this for a HTTPS page that has an HTTP link? Thanks, Yael
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | yaelslater0 -
Linking from purchased businesses to my own
Hi All, An SEO and Google guidelines question. We've recently purchased several local businesses that have websites. Legally, we've put a disclaimer saying we've purchased those businesses, the question is whether we should link from those sites to our main site. Will this bring a manual action from Google? It's legitimate that we'd like the visitors from those websites come to our main site because those business no longer named the way they were. So, is it OK to link from these sites to ours? Will this violate Google's guidelines regarding backlinking? Should we even link and if so add the rel:nofollow tag? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | OrendaLtd2 -
Are links to our website through our affiliate program hurting our rankings?
We have an affiliate program for an educational related course product and I am becoming worried that links to us on our affiliate's websites are hurting our site rankings. I have read that google is usually pretty good about picking up on affiliate links and not giving the follow links credit, but not sure if that is just for the big affiliate networks or if they can spot less obvious affiliate programs. With this in mind, would you ask all affiliates to use the nofollow tag on all links coming in, or would you make sure that the links are more branded in nature? There are a mix of text links along with banners and other display components. There would be editing that would need to be done to the core files of our affiliate/member software (aMember Pro) to make all links nofollow and we want to see if there are other recommendations before doing so. We are trying to fight out way out of what we believe is an over-optimized anchor text penalty and are evaluating all areas that we can make improvements. Any advice is greatly appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | youngb550 -
Site Redesign - Inbound Links
Hello all. What would be some of the best practices or good resources on site redesign while maintaining inbound links? We would hate to have the natural, organic links to the site we have generated over the past 3 years to all of a sudden become broken. The domain is not changing but the URL structure very well may. For example, www.domain dot com/blog/postabouttopic which has many inbound links may move to www.domain dot com/news/blog/postabouttopic Is it a matter of simply using 301 redirects from the old pages to the new pages? Is there any issues to be aware of when having hundreds of 301 redirects? Is there a best practice? A good site that explains this in detail? Thank you for your time! Have a great day!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | S2RSolutions0 -
How much better are these backlinks ?
How Much better is a do follow backlink from these 3 pages PA of 28 with 12 outbound do follow links compared to a PA of 31 with 16 out bound links ? Compared to a PA of 42 with 35 out links ? How different would the link juice be from these 3 pages with the do follow links as described ? What has been your experience ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jlane90 -
Competing with Spammy Links
One of my client's leading competitors is well stacked in terms of rank/authority. PA: 61, DA: 53. However, in OSE I estimate that +/- of all links on the first page are from sites such as "http://www.shopp011.freedownloadhub.com/Link-Exchange/browse.php?id=17", "http://www.shopp002.freedownloadhub.com/Link-Exchange/browse.php?id=17", "http://www.shopp029.freedownloadhub.com/Link-Exchange/browse.php?id=17". Personally, I would consider this to be a little spammy. However, I admit that I could be wrong. What's the best approach when trying to take on a competitor like this? Wait it out and tell my client to keep blogging/selling as per the schedule until Google pics up on these links?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ShippingContainer0 -
Google, Links and Javascript
So today I was taking a look at http://www.seomoz.org/top500 page and saw that the AddThis page is currently at the position 19. I think the main reason for that is because their plugin create, through javascript, linkbacks to their page where their share buttons reside. So any page with AddThis installed would easily have 4/5 linbacks to their site, creating that huge amount of linkbacks they have. Ok, that pretty much shows that Google doesn´t care if the link is created in the HTML (on the backend) or through Javascript (frontend). But heres the catch. If someones create a free plugin for wordpress/drupal or any other huge cms platform out there with a feature that linkbacks to the page of the creator of the plugin (thats pretty common, I know) but instead of inserting the link in the plugin source code they put it somewhere else, wich then is loaded with a javascript code (exactly how AddThis works). This would allow the owner of the plugin to change the link showed at anytime he wants. The main reason for that would be, dont know, an URL address update for his blog or businness or something. However that could easily be used to link to whatever tha hell the owner of the plugin wants to. What your thoughts about this, I think this could be easily classified as White or Black hat depending on what the owners do. However, would google think the same way about it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bemcapaz0 -
Linking to Authorities
Hello, I know that if its good for the user, its not a bad move. But for this question I am specifically asking for how it affects my ranking. Does it help my ranking to link to appropriate authority sites?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tylerfraser
Have you done any tests to see if linking out to authoritative sites like .gov info pages, industry leaders, etc. help with a sites ranking. I am thinking about taking of all of these outgoing links and just link to my important pages. Thank you, Tyler0