Best SEO practice to redirect affiliate link

[darkmediagroup]

Hello,

I got an affiliate program on my website, that redirects the affiliate link to the main site like:

site.com/ads/aff_code/  ->  site.com/ (The redirect is done using a 301 status code.)

On the redirect process the site stores a cookie to track the affiliate sale.

• Will Google and others SE follow this permanent redirect, transferring the relevance of this affiliate link to my main site? In other words, if an affiliate does something wrong (like spams), does the bad reputation will be transferred to my main site?
• Is there a better way to do that from a SEO standpoint?

Thanks,

[fablau]

Wonderful, thank you Everett.

[Everett]

I'll mark this as answered and will head over to the newer thread.

[fablau]

Thank you Everett, good points!

I have opened another thread on this topic (I didn't expect you to reply on this old one!) where I am discussing about possible solutions for inbound affiliate links:

https://moz.com/community/q/affiliate-links-dilemma

It looks like my best solution would be to leave the way it is, maybe changing 301 redirects with 302? How would you suggest tackling this issue... or would you suggest just "ignoring" and leave the way we all have done, with a simple 301 redirect to the "clean" URL?

Thank you again.

[Everett]

Fabrizo,

It was a good point for you to bring up. The truth is, I don't know what Google's stance is on stuff like this these days because they constantly change it and you can read opposing things straight from Google in two or more different places. Also, I don't think Google cares about the user as much as they say when it comes to our sites because they make it difficult for us to rank well while also providing rich JS-based, interactive experiences. So thinking of the users on a big affiliate site, the best UX would be to show them the domain they're about to visit (e.g. Amazon.com) but Google doesn't like sites monetized this way (it seems) so we have to obfuscate what we're doing, which is B.S. since obviously the users like the site or they wouldn't be using it. This is all about Googlebot not keeping up with web dev technology. Maybe they should spend less time on self-driving cars and VR goggles and more time on that.

Personally, I would not have a bunch of href links on my site pointing to an internal folder that is blocked in the robots.txt file. I "may" use javascript links and then obfuscate the javascript somehow, but Googlebot doesn't like when you keep it from rendering JS and you'll start to see errors come up in GSC and elsewhere that you're blocking content from being rendered. Does that impact rankings? Hard to tell.

[fablau]

Yes, thank you Everett, I read about that, and I agree with you that that would be a bullet-proof solution.

I wanted just to check if what Google states now days would actually work, I couldn't see that mentioned on this thread before. But looks like you'd agree with Google on that, right?

Thank you again!

[Everett]

Fabrizo,

I was suggesting going through an intermediate domain, as opposed to just an intermediate page. There is more protection there.

[fablau]

I know this is a rather old thread, butI am wondering if anything is changed since this topic was discussed.

I see Google suggesting redirecting links to an intermediate page blocked by robots.txt to avoid schemes penalties:

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66356?hl=en

Ideas on that?

[darkmediagroup]

It is clear to me now.

At the moment, I changed the redirect to 302 and blocked the /ads/ folder on the robots.txt. But I will surely proceed setting up a new domain for the affiliate traffic.

Thanks,

[Everett]

Hello Henrique,

2. I mean putting /ads/ on a totally separate domain (e.g. youraffiliateprogram.com/ads/) which then redirects to yoursite.com. This way you can totally block that entire domain if you wanted to. When an affiliate links to youraffiliateprogram.com/ads/pageID the user who clicks on the link will get redirected to yoursite.com/pageID.

This set up has the advantage that you can block the entire affiliate program domain from being indexed in the robots.txt file if you wanted to, or you could try to use a 301 redirect and benefit from the links - until it stops working or you get penalized, at which point it you could block the affiliate program domain in the robots.txt, and/or change the redirects from 301 to a 302 rather quickly.

To answer your last question, yes you could simply change the redirect from a 301 to a 302 and that should solve the issue at the final landing page level, but since a lot of affiliates are still linking directly to your domain prior to getting redirected it could still cause issues. For example...

Affiliate A links to YourSite.com/ads/123 without using a rel nofollow tag in the link. This is still a link to your site from them, regardless of what happens next.

YourSite.com/ads/123 proceeds to 302 redirect the visitor to YourSite.com/123. The won't bass the pagerank on to your landing page, but it did nothing to stop the fact that you have a direct, followable affiliate link going to your site.

If you put in your Terms for affiliates that they have to use a nofollow tag in links to you, and you supply the nofollow tag in the code when they are "building" links from within your affiliate system, you should be ok. You may also want to block /ads/ in the robots.txt file just to be sure if you're going to take this route.

[darkmediagroup]

Hello,

1. I will add the nofollow rel to our affiliate links, but this will only solve part of the problem. Many just grab the URL and build their own links.

2. You mean when someone hits site.com/ads/, gets redirected to subdomain.site.com and than to my main site.com? 301 redirects won't transfer the page rank to the page they are redirecting to?

What about changing the status code from 301 to 302 when redirecting from site.com/ads/ to site.com? Will this transfer the page rank? Any other status code that seems more suitable in this situation, like see other (303)?

[Everett]

Blocking the /ads/ directory via the robots.txt file is not going to stop your site from being associated with affiliates who link to you. The best thing you can do in this case would be one of two things:

1. Ensure all affiliates are linking with a rel = "nofollow" attibute in the href tag (i.e. nofollow their links). You can provide the nofollow tag in the link code that they copy to make it easy for them.

Or

2. If you are trying to get some pagerank out of your affiliate links, but want to be able to react quickly in the event of a link-based penalty as a result of this practice, you could have affiliates link through another domain, which then 301 redirects to your landing page. This way you can kill off all the links simply be cutting the redirect (or changing it to a 302, or blocking Google from following the redirect with a tactic similar to the robots.txt block described above...) on the other domain instead of having to disavow a bunch of affiliate links, or instead of asking affiliates to updating their links.

Personally I'd go with option #1. You can combine that with the robots.txt block of your /ads/ directory too.

[CleverPhD]

If you read the article I mentioned above, it really does not hide anything from Google, but you are clearly saying that these links are of no value.

I would use the 301 redirect.

In your case, yes that would save a step to just put /ads/ into robots.

[CleverPhD]

Google will follow a 301 and will transfer almost all the link equity/or lack of it.   Common practice is to 301 redirect through a page that is in robots.txt.  This prevents Google from following while moving the user along.

More here http://makeitrank.com/affiliate-links-seo