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!
-
Thanks for the suggestion Everett. I have the Wordpress plugin Pretty Link already installed so your solution would be really easy to set up and I plan on doing so.
Thanks!
-
If you can make those links nofollow by updating files within your affiliate software I'd opt for that route over asking affiliates to add a nofollow tag. If you can't update existing links that way you'll have to ask the affiliates to update them.
Don't rely on affiliates to add the nofollow tag for you going forward. Give it to them in the code they copy from the site.
I like to recommend sending all affiliate links through an external redirect first. For example, you might have www.YourAffiliateDomain.com/?afflink=123, which would then 302 redirect to the page they want to link to. This way if anything ever goes wrong you can kill off that domain and get rid of all of those incoming links in a flash. They'd also be going through a 302 prior to hitting your main site so no pagerank would be getting passed and you'd be in good graces with Google whether those links were nofollowed or not.
-
I will check every website which links to me, then ask the people with bad/duplicate content to add a nofollow link.
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
-
Backlink is good or bad? All of the website links were of the same type.
Backlink is good or bad? All of the website links were of the same type. Website niche - Animation and 3D Rendering Studios Backlink from - http://www.adamfrisby.com/create-home-design-and-interior-decor-in-2d-3d.html the anchor tag is image URL from one of the many images in that post.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | varunrupal0 -
Is the flow of page rank through anchor text links diminished if hidden using tabs
Hi there, Whilst there is plenty of information online regarding the devaluation of hidden content using tabs, it seems to be more difficult to get a clear answer as to how page rank is impacted when anchor text links are hidden. If an anchor text link is hidden using tabs, will the flow of page rank to the page the anchor text leads to be negatively impacted? If so, why? To add further context, whilst the anchor text link would be visible in the HTML, the tab would be dependant on JavaScript to function. Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEONOW1230 -
Ranking drop
Hello there, Based on Moz's rank tracker our keywords ranking have been dropping in ranking. Does anyone know what might be the cause? We have been building quality "white hat" links which are very relevant to our niche Thanks, Robert
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | roberthseo0 -
Site Rollback for Careless Website Design That Caused Rank Drop
New PPC Client (out of necessity) had their site redesigned for mobile without much care given to it by a "SEO Expert". None of the meta data was copied over to the new images and pages, much of the old content was simply deleted, intra site links completely changed. Huge hits in organic rank, resulting in traffic declines occurred as their lead volume hit zero the following month (April 21 until Present). Any concerns I should have in doing a simple rollback beyond redirects and GWT (Search Console) ops? Current plan is 1. Setup redirects back to old site 2. Launch PPC campaign to recover call volume and leads. 3. Optimize old site for mobile simultaneously with simple responsive framework for menu, text. 4. Start disavowing poor-quality links that were added (got 10 with spam rating >4). 5. Eventually move them back to Wordpress and the theme they paid for with site content, meta data, etc all in tact.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jclmns0 -
Getting individual website pages to rank for their targeted terms instead of just the home page
Hi Everyone, There is a pattern which I have noticed when trying to get individual pages to rank for the allocated targeted terms when I execute an SEO campaign and would been keen on anyones thoughts on how they have effectively addressed this. Let me try and explain this by going through an example: Let's say I am a business coach and already have a website where it includes several of my different coaching services. Now for this SEO campaign, I'm looking to improve exposure for the clients "business coaching" services. I have a quick look at analytics and rankings and notice that the website already ranks fairly well for that term but from the home page and not the service page. I go through the usual process of optimising the site (on-page - content, meta data, internal linking) as well as a linkbuilding campaign throughout the next couple of month's, however this results in either just the home page improving or the business page does improve, but the homepage's existing ranking has suffered, therefore not benefiting the site overall. My question: If a term already ranks or receives a decent amount of traffic from the home page and not from the page that its supposed to, why do you think its the case and what would you be your approach to try shift the traffic to the individual page, without impacting the site too much?. Note: To add the home page keyword target term would have been updated? Thanks, Vahe
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Vahe.Arabian0 -
Website layout for a new website [Over 50 Pages & targeting Long Tail Keywords]
Hey everyone, We are designing a new website with over 50 pages and I have a question regarding the layout. Should I target my long tail keywords via blog pages? It will be easier to manage and list and link out to similar articles related to my long tail keywords using a word press blog. For this example - lets suppose the website is www.orange.com and we sells 'Oranges' Am I going about this in the right way? Main Section: Main Section 1 : Home Page - Keyword Targeted - Orange Main Section 2 : Important Conversion page - 'Buy oranges' Long Tail Keyword (LTK) 1: www.orange.com/blog/LTK1 Subsection(SS): www.orange.com/blog/LTK1/SS1 www.orange.com/blog/LTK1/SS1a www.orange.com/blog/LTK1/SS1b Long Tail Keyword (LTK) 2: www.orange.com/blog/LTK2 Long Tail Keyword (LTK) 3: www.orange.com/blog/LTK3 Subsection(SS): www.orange.com/blog/LTK1/SS3 www.orange.com/blog/LTK1/SS3a www.orange.com/blog/LTK1/SS3b All these long tail pages and sub sections under them are built specifically for hosting content that targets these specific long tail keywords. Most of my traffic will come initially via the sub section pages - and it is important for me to rank well for these terms initially. _E.g. if someone searches for the keyword 'SS3b' on Google - my corresponding page www.orange.com/blog/LTK1/SS3b should rank well on the results page. _ For ranking purposes - will using this blog/category structure hurt or benefit me? Instead do you think I should build static pages? Also, we are targeting more than 50 long tail keywords - and building quality content for each of these keywords - and I assume that we will be doing this continuously. So in the long term term which is more beneficial? Do you have any suggestions on if I am going about this the right way? Apologies for using these random terms - oranges, LKT, SS etc in this example. However, I hope that the question is clear. Looking forward to some interesting answers on this! Please feel free to share your thoughts.. Thank you! Natasha
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Natashadogres0 -
Competitor purchased thousands of hidden links to our website... will it hurt rankings?
A competitor has allegedly purchased a site wide HIDDEN link on a property that links to our website. Would this link hurt our rankings? Requests to the site to remove those links didn't go well -- they state they can legally link to any site they like and are not going to remove those links. Technically speaking, this is what the link looks like in their html: Our Primary Keyword The thousands of hidden links from this website will now vastly outnumber our existing backlinks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Nick_Seo_Moz0 -
If google ignores links from "spammy" link directories ...
Then why does SEO moz have this list: http://www.seomoz.org/dp/seo-directory ?? Included in that list are some pretty spammy looking sites such as: <colgroup><col width="345"></colgroup>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | adriandg
| http://www.site-sift.com/ |
| http://www.2yi.net/ |
| http://www.sevenseek.com/ |
| http://greenstalk.com/ |
| http://anthonyparsons.com/ |
| http://www.rakcha.com/ |
| http://www.goguides.org/ |
| http://gosearchbusiness.com/ |
| http://funender.com/free_link_directory/ |
| http://www.joeant.com/ |
| http://www.browse8.com/ |
| http://linkopedia.com/ |
| http://kwika.org/ |
| http://tygo.com/ |
| http://netzoning.com/ |
| http://goongee.com/ |
| http://bigall.com/ |
| http://www.incrawler.com/ |
| http://rubberstamped.org/ |
| http://lookforth.com/ |
| http://worldsiteindex.com/ |
| http://linksgiving.com/ |
| http://azoos.com/ |
| http://www.uncoverthenet.com/ |
| http://ewilla.com/ |0
