Can 302 chains (affiliate links) from "toxic" sources hurt you? Or are you "shielded"?

[ntcma]

Hi,

I'm going through some affiliate links, which send visitors to our website via a chain of several 302 redirects

Some of them are relevant links, others perhaps not so much.

I know that Google doesn't pass PageRank on 302s...

But are they still considered valid links that pass, let's say, "reputation", "relevance", "link neighbourhood" kind of signals?

Otherwise put, is a 302 similar to adding the "nofollow" attribute on a link? Sort of? Not at all?

More succinctly put, should I be worried about "toxic" sources separated from us by 302 redirect chains?

By the way, yes I recognize that (Google's 302 redirect chain handling aside) associating our brand with perhaps what some might consider spammy websites is not in general a good move; I'm concerned with the technical SEO implications here however.

In fact, this technical information may very well help drive decisions/policies on where we allow our affiliate advertising to appear.

Thanks

PS - The affiliate company by the way is cj.com if that helps

[webmethod]

Hi there,

Any reputable affiliate should be adding nofollow to outbound links, and I would be concerned if they weren't. Even if PR isn't passed on 302s, what's stopping the affiliate from making them 301s or simply direct links in future?

Blocking GoogleBot using robots.txt on landing pages isn't going to stop Google indexing URLs it finds - you would have to use canonicals or noindex on the page for that. Even that wouldn't negate the impact of inbound links from potentially "toxic" websites.

I would say that you can't have your cake and eat it. If you're getting traffic and sales from these affiliate links then they're good for business. However there's a good chance if the sites are poorly regarded by Google, and they aren't using nofollow on the links that you will be penalised in organic listings.

I have used affiliates in the past, and learnt to keep them on a tight leash.

If you're concerned about your link profile I can recommend using cognitiveseo.com to analyse it.

Regards

George

[ntcma]

Thanks; I had not heard that a 302 over time can start to be considered a 301 – would you be able to share any information about this?

I took your advice, and so far haven't noticed anything in WMT, but that only shows the top 1,000 links; also looking through ahrefs.com... nothing confirmed yet.

[HiveDigitalInc]

We know that over time Google will consider a 302 redirect as permanent if it remains in place. The 302 redirect is default, so Google often is forced to determine whether a person intended to place a 302 or just did it out of laziness. We recommend that you go ahead and use robots.txt to block the affiliate URL parameters so that you don't ever have to worry about it at all.

Is the affiliate program on your site or are you using a 3rd party? If you are using a 3rd party, they might already block Google from crawling those URLs. An easy way to check this would be to follow the redirect chain and take note of the domains. Check if any use either robots.txt or X-Robots-Header to block Googlebot. You can also check your own links in GWT to see if they show up.