What is the right way to link to your main site?
-
Hi,
we have a system for tracking the leads that comes from a specific affiliate website. each affiliate has a unique tracking code.
not only for affiliates that work with us but also for the SEO team has an affiliate tracking code so our bosses can track the leads and traffic that come from the activity of the SEO team.
this means, links towards our website look like:
www.mydomain.com/?t_src=campaign&t=AFF&t_cre=links&A=371
I have few questions about this:
1. This is the right way to link to my company site? How dose google crawl those link? It's can harm the link value?
2. What is my option to show my boss all the traffic / leads that our seo team brings to the site trough Google Analytics?
Hope to get your support.
Thanks in advance.
-
Hell Joni,
Although Thomas seems to be answering someone else's question here (replied in the wrong window?) Mihai has done a great job of providing you with actionable advice related to your question.
Yes, those kinds of links can be a problem IF you do not use a rel canonical tag. However, it is not uncommon for websites to use tracking parameters in the URL. This is fine as long as you use a rel canonical tag and/or tell Google and Bing to ignore those parameters. Most likely Google already knows to ignore them anyway. Please read these articles and let us know if you still need help with this...
Article by Dr. Pete on Rel Canonical Tags http://moz.com/blog/rel-confused-answers-to-your-rel-canonical-questions
Setting up campaign tracking URLs If you use Google Analytics: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1033867?hl=en
About Rel Canonical Tag Support by Google:
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139394?hl=enAbout URL Parameters: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1235687?hl=en
-
Hi,
Thanks for you replay but what i'm trying to ask here is if this kind of links:
www.mydomain.com/?t_src=campaign&t=AFF&t_cre=links&A=371
Can make me a problem with my link building strategy? you see, those kind of link is not look like a direct link to my site even though it is! So i'm asking how google refer those links?
I going to start a new press release campaign and want to track all over the link & the conversation that come from there.
Hope to get you supper again.
Thanks in advance.
-
http://moz.com/blog/save-your-website-with-redirects
Have you ever redirected a page hoping to see a boost in rankings, but nothing happened? Or worse, traffic actually went down?
When done right, 301 redirects have awesome power to clean up messy architecture, solve outdated content problems and improve user experience — all while preserving link equity and your ranking power.
When done wrong, the results can be disastrous.
In the past year, because Google cracked down hard on low quality links, the potential damage from 301 mistakes increased dramatically. There's also evidence that Google has slightly changed how they handle non-relevant redirects, which makes proper implementation more important than ever.
<center>
From Dr. Pete's post - An SEO's Guide to HTTP Status Codes
</center>
Semantic relevance 101: anatomy of a "perfect" redirect
A perfect 301 redirect works as a simple “change of address” for your content. Ideally, this means everything about the page except the URL stays the same including content, title tag, images, and layout.
When done properly, we know from testing and statements from Google that a 301 redirect passes somewhere around 85% of its original link equity.
The new page doesn’t have to be a perfect match for the 301 to pass equity, but problems arise when webmasters use the 301 to redirect visitors to non-relevant pages. The further away you get from semantically relevant content, the less likely your redirect will pass maximum link juice.
For example, if you have a page about “labrador,” then redirecting to a page about “dogs” makes sense, but redirecting to a page about “tacos” does not.
<center></center>
301 redirecting everything to the home page
Savvy SEOs have known for a long time that redirecting a huge number of pages to a home page isn’t the best policy, even when using a 301. Recent statements by Google representatives suggest that Google may go a step further and treat bulk redirects to the home page of a website as 404s, or soft 404s at best.
This means that instead of passing link equity through the 301, Google may simply drop the old URLs from its index without passing any link equity at all.
While it’s difficult to prove exactly how search engines handle mass home page redirects, it’s fair to say that any time you 301 a large number of pages to a single questionably relevant URL, you shouldn’t expect those redirects to significantly boost your SEO efforts.
<center></center>
**Better alternative: **When necessary, redirect relevant pages to closely related URLs. Category pages are better than a general homepage.
If the page is no longer relevant, receives little traffic, and a better page does not exist, it’s often perfectly okay to serve a 404 or 410 status code.
Danger: 301 redirects and bad backlinks
Before Penguin, SEOs widely believed that bad links couldn’t hurt you, and redirecting entire domains with bad links wasn’t likely to have much of an effect.
Then Google dropped the hammer on low-quality links.
If the Penguin update and developments of the past year have taught us anything, it’s this:
When you redirect a domain, its bad backlinks go with it.
<center></center>
Webmasters often roll up several older domains into a single website, not realizing that bad backlinks may harbor poison that sickens the entire effort. If you’ve been penalized or suffered from low-quality backlinks, it’s often easier and more effective to simply stop the redirect than to try and clean up individual links.
Individual URLs with bad links
The same concept works at the individual URL level. If you redirect a single URL with bad backlinks attached to it, those bad links will then point to your new URL.
In this case, it’s often better to simply drop the page with a 404 or 410, and let those links drop from the index.
Infinite loops and long chains
If you perform an SEO audit on a site, you’ll hopefully discover any potentially harmful redirect loops or crawling errors caused by overly-complex redirect patterns.
While it’s generally believed that Google will follow many, many redirects, each step has the potential to diminish link equity, dilute anchor text relevance, and lead to crawling and indexing errors.
<center></center>
One or two steps is generally the most you want out of any redirect chain.
New changes for 302s
SEOs typically hate 302s, but recent evidence suggests search engines may now be changing how they handle them — at least a little.
Google knows that webmasters make mistakes, and recent tests by Geoff Kenyon showed that 302 redirects have potential to pass link equity. The theory is that 302s (meant to be temporary) are so often implemented incorrectly, that Google treats them as “soft” 301s.
So, not only do search engines limit us when we try to get too clever, but they also help to keep us from shooting ourselves in the foot.
-
Hey Joni,
1. There's no problem crawling those links (Google campaign tracking uses parameter-based URLs as well). To ensure these links don't cause duplicate content issues, either set Webmaster Tools to ignore these parameters or use a rel="canonical" tag on your pages to indicate the correct URL (the last method would be better since it works for all search engines).
2. You can either use the Google Analytics campaign tracking by changing the name of your parameters to match the ones used by GA, or you can use event tracking with your own parameters through JavaScript (you can see an example of using this for tracking keyword ranking)
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
-
Affiliate links and parameters creating duplicate page titles
Hi, we have an affiliate system and use rel=**canonical **to canonicalise them to the right link. Still, we see those links creating duplicate page titles, in Moz crawl and in Google search console. How are we supposed to treat those links so they do not create duplicate content? Thanks for your help!
Affiliate Marketing | | guidetoiceland0 -
Low value link building to sitemap.xml
During some competitive research recently I discovered one of my clients competitors sites had an interesting backlink profile. Looking at the top-pages report in Open Site Explorer the home page was the #1 page (as you'd expect) with 2.5k links from about 500 linking root domains The second page was the sitemap.xml (~1.5k links, 400 linking root domains) and the third was their /feed page (again, ~1.5k links, 350 linking root domains). Links to these two pages aren't something that would happen naturally (particularly the sitemap.xml). There's a whole load of evidence for nasty low quality link building such as over-optimised keyword rich anchor text, comment spam, and even some blog/article based link networks. It's a pretty nasty niche with lots of cut-throat affiliate marketing. My guess here is that someone may have made a mistake using an automated link building too, but I'd be interested in what you might think? Have you seen this before? (Sorry, I can't reveal the domains in question as I'm bound by an NDA.)
Affiliate Marketing | | DougRoberts0 -
Documentation to back up strategy for satellite sites
Hi, I am planning on launching satellite sites. From my understanding I should have unique IP addresses and a different template than my main site to avoid duplication and separate from the main site. Any good articles I could use as documentation to back up what I am saying? (or if people think I should be doing things differently feel free to pitch in with that as well)
Affiliate Marketing | | theLotter0 -
In what ways would an affiliate site be okay with Google?
I know Google has slammed affiliate sites hard. But affiliate marketing can be a real business and had an idea for one, but I would like to know if ALL affiliate sites are looked at as evil in Google's eyes, or if it's just those with thin and duplicate content in the product descriptions. I know they want brands to come up ahead of affiliates of that brand, and that makes sense. If I sold Acme Widgets products, Acme Widgets itself should come up ahead of my site. But what if the site sold widgets in general, with the term widgets not a branded keyword? If all product descriptions are unique and well-written content, on a site that is high quality, would it still be downgraded by Google just because there are affilate links in it? I guess overall the question could be boiled down to, are affiliate sites hit because they have horrible content or because they have links to affiliate programs in them?
Affiliate Marketing | | bizzer0 -
SEO and Affiliate Links
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
Affiliate Marketing | | stereo690 -
Limit of links in the same page
Hi, I have some pages that have more than 100 links. They are links to some stores (affiliate links). I set all of them as rel="nofollow" but I think Google is penalizing me because the link quantity. What is a good number of URL in the same page? Thanks
Affiliate Marketing | | GDB0 -
I need some feedback on the value of affiliate aggregators like Link Share
My company decided to start a Link Share affiliate program at the beginning of this year. I've had serious reservations about the value of the program since the beginning but was overruled. Here are my concerns: The majority of publishers seem to be coupon scraper sites or borderline link farms I am told the biggest revenue earners in our network are publishing articles about my company with links back to our site but if they are Google Alerts sure isn't finding them and a manual search hasn't turned up anything either. This makes me think these publishers are using some sort of unsavory way to drive traffic to our site or maybe even cookie traffic that was coming to our site anyway in order to get credit for the sale. Most of all I'd like to hear from anyone else who has used Link Share in the past. Secondly I realize there's not a lot of information here but I'm wondering if this passes the smell test for anyone else. Any feedback would be appreciated.
Affiliate Marketing | | eTundra0 -
Hosting a Niche Directory on your Site
I'm keen to hear feedback from anyone who has installed a directory onto their e-commerce site. By directory, I mean that - subject to human review and possibly a small fee - a relevant site owner in my niche can create a listing that is effectively a page on my site where they control the main content, links & images.
Affiliate Marketing | | jdeb
People using our site would enter the directory section from our resources / advice top level category and browse the index of the directory to reach a listed site's dedicated page. The idea for it came up when we were discussing ways to get more backlinks. Offering people a whole page directory listing seems like a good way of negotiating a link in return that isn't just from the other site's link page. I'm looking for everyone's stories on this: your reasons for doing it, how you went about it and the tools you used and what your results where, in particular: was it worth it? We aren't thinking about starting a new site for the directory, it would be added onto our main site (which is old and has good PR etc etc). However, it would still be good to hear from both sides of the fence on that issue. Over to you. J0