Does Adding Affiliate ID's to Link Affects it's Value

[JonsonSwartz]

Hello,

I have a question about adding Affiliate ID's to links.

I receive a DoFollow link to my website with an affiliate ID in order to track the leads and the traffic that comes from each affiliate link/website.

• does this link (with the affiliate ID) pass Juice from the affiliate website? (I use canonical link element on my website pages)?

• how does Google deals with links with affiliate IDs ?

• is adding Affiliate ID to links reduces it's value?

[Charlessipe]

I think affiliates are basically advertising that is paid based on performance and we know that Google wants advertising links to be no-followed. No-following the links would be the safe route to take.

[Anti-Alex]

For your questions:

1. If it's a straight link like this http://domain.com/page/?affiliate_id=123, yes that will pass juice

2. If you're using variables in the url string like this ?var=123, Google will ignore the ?var=123 and treat the link as a URL without the variables. You can apply special tags that let Google know that the variables are important if they are necessary.

3. No adding an affiliate ID or variable to a link won't reduce it's value as long as you don't rewrite the link and use some sort of fancy redirect. Many affiliate program software use a link schema to track links that they generate.

If you're an affiliate program and you have links pointing to your site, the links shouldn't pass any SEO juice. Google can treat that as a way of purchasing links and penalize your site for buying links. What you can do is setup a sort of redirect for links by using affiliate program software to handle tracking or using a subdomain redirect that stops the juice from flowing from the website promoting your products.

[FedeEinhorn]

I suggest you take a look at the following Q&A explaining the implications of having affiliate links pointing directly to your site and how to deal with that: http://moz.com/community/q/blocking-affiliate-links-via-robots-txt

Hope that helps!