How to flag inbound affiliate links to Search Engines

[Sarbs]

Afternoon Mozzers,

I was chatting to our VP of marketing earlier about one of our sites with a somewhat unhealthy looking link profile. This is primarily caused by the sector its in and the fact that lots of low quality lead generators / affiliates operate there, sending traffic to us in return for payment on accepted leads.

Now, he recalled that there is a way to mark these inbound links, through a URL parameter he thought, as being affiliates and therefore should be ignored as we don’t want them misinterpreted as an attempt to manipulate our rankings.

I have been doing a spot of research but can't find a straight answer. heres a few articles i looked at: blogaid, Yoast, Webmaster world and the Moz Q&A.The problem is all these are from the perspective of a site linking out and acting as an affiliate, so all deal with that page not losing PR. The two methods i have derived from this boil down to:

1. No follow the links
2. Use an intermediary redirect page and script which you can block from robots.txt

So, back to our case - Are there any ways we can signal to Search engines, as the destination site, that these links are from affiliates (such as this URL parameter our VP had vague recollections off) or should i just get in touch and ask the sites to make them Nofollow?

Thanks, Tom.

[Everett]

Tom,

You can use the Disavow Links tool to do this for existing links, though I would advise updating the way your affiliate program works so as to avoid the issue going forward. For example, when providing the link code to affiliates include the rel nofollow tag, as mentioned above.

Most affiliate programs will send the user through an internal redirect, which can pass on the unique identifying parameter for the affiliate so they get credit for the conversions. I understand you may not want to go that route due to the work involved, but this is really the standard for affiliate programs these days. It allows you complete control on your end without having to bother the affiliates to update their links.

Good luck!

[Sarbs]

Hi Bradley and thanks for the feedback.

I’m reluctant to use the intermediary page / redirect combo as our publishers also append URL parameters for use in internal tracking and commission payment to their landing pages. As we have a large number of these affiliates having to set up a series of redirect cases (which i know we could do by identifying their source and original URL values) could be more effort than its worth, particularly with on-going maintenance. As such I'm currently inclined to go with the nofollow approach.

It seems through the silence in the Moz community that there is no URL parameter either so I’m assuming our VP was alluding to the two methods discussed which is what i was hoping. Going to leave this question open a little longer however just in case anyone else has any further insights!

Thanks, Tom.

[brad.s.knutson]

I think using an intermediary page with a redirect script is the way to go.  This allows you to modify the redirect (301 vs 302), the server header, and the destination - after the fact.

Ideally, you could do this going forward.  For your current affiliates, you could reach out to them and provide a new affiliate link, or ask them to nofollow the link.  This part isn't ideal, but if you had the intermediary redirect page you could handle this without contacting the affiliate.