Before I request hundreds of links for "nofollow" I want to verify I'm doing the right thing
-
Happy Thanksgiving Mozers,
In my efforts to get rid of a Google penalty, I've come to the conclusion that all the travel agents who link to our site with a unique code, are technically affiliates because they get commission. Therefore we need to get all of them to switch their links to "rel=nofollow".
I'm worried this shift will cost us in search rankings, especially since none of our competitors require nofollow tags. So before I actually begin requiring the switch, I wanted to just double check that I'm not misinterpreting Google.
Our travel agents are paid commission on every sale (whether their customers click the link from their website to ours, or calls in and gives us that agent's code. So even though our travel agents aren't technically part of an "affiliate program" run through CJ or anything, they are in Google's eyes affiliates of my company. Therefore their links with their personal codes all need to be nofollow.
Am I correct on this? I can't find anywhere where Google goes into great depth explaining various types of affiliates.
-
Keep nofollowing your links everyone - eventually we'll break Google!
-
Hi friend,
Here is my take on this..
I would tag all the affiliate links with the 'nofollow' attribute no matter what the consequences might be as in the long run it would place you in the good books of Google as its a good gesture as a webmaster.
Here is an article from SEL in this regard:
http://searchengineland.com/googles-matt-cutts-on-affiliate-links-we-handle-majority-of-them-125859
Best regards,
Devanur Rafi
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
-
URL with affiliate ID won't stop outranking our homepage. Time for nuclear option?
We have affiliate links applied to our index URL - https://playon.co - which are not picked up as a duplicate URLs by Google. We've applied a canonical URL, but our homepage is a 301 redirect to a page with a language parameter. So what happens is: https://playon.co/ goes to https://playon.co/en Affiliate links such as https://playon.co/#/?affiliate_token=1390448caccb7d go to https://playon.co/en#/?affiliate_token=1390448caccb7d This gets picked up as rel="canonical" href="https://playon.co/en" which I assumed marked it as a non-canonical page. Nonetheless, we keep seeing this affiliate "page" ranking - even above our own homepage for some terms. Worse, the affiliate URL also contains old cached information of the page. I don't even see how these SERP results should exist, because the affiliate link just ends up at the homepage (https://playon.co/en) My questions: What can we do to remove these affiliate URL versions of our homepage from being ranked? Google doesn't see anything after the hash in the indexed affiliate URLs. If we were to no-index our index URL (https://playon.co/) to completely remove the affiliates links, would our canonical version (https://playon.co/en) assume the top listing, or will we have effectively nuked our entire site? Appreciate any help.
Affiliate Marketing | | jmoreland0 -
Affiliate links and parameters creating duplicate page titles
Hi, we have an affiliate system and use rel=**canonical **to canonicalise them to the right link. Still, we see those links creating duplicate page titles, in Moz crawl and in Google search console. How are we supposed to treat those links so they do not create duplicate content? Thanks for your help!
Affiliate Marketing | | guidetoiceland0 -
Looking for a way to crawl and test validity of affiliate links at scale. Ideas?
Hey all, I'm on the hunt for a service that will crawl our affiliate links and let us know when they return an error. I need to know that the last URL in the chain is returning a 200 over thousands of pages and links on a continual basis. The hitch is that most crawlers like Screaming Frog will return all of our links as working because it's only testing the first step, and this really requires a cloud solution anyway. Anyone happen to know of something? Edit for clarity's sake: I need something to check entire redirect chains in bulk that isn't a Wordpress plugin, isn't a website where you plug in a URL and it cuts you off after the first 100 results, and has the ability to crawl the site and provide reporting on a continual basis. Bi75jku
Affiliate Marketing | | BradsDeals0 -
Setting up external link goals in GA
I have recently switched all my travel affiliate links to TripAdvisor using their javascript code that converts the natural links (direct links to TA URLs) to affiliate links. I have set up goal tracking in GA to try to put a monetary value on clicks through to these links (based on the known conversion rate to commissionable bookings) but GA is over-reporting the goals by a very large margin. I'm wondering what I've done wrong. The first screen shot below is of the goal settings I used in GA. The second screenshot shows that GA is reporting 7125 goal completions since I set up the goal on 7 August. The third screenshot shows the actual number of GA events recorded on outbound clicks to TA URLs in the same period, which is just 97. So the goal completions being recorded far exceed the actual goal completions, but I'm not sure why. I know I've done something wrong but as this is the first time I've used goals, I'd appreciate some help to see what I've done wrong. Thank you. 3f7dc3de6f9f1373d47994144a5cb016 56aa39130a7d54b07d8f2ce9cf1d7fb0 35ee827275928ca8c4d4c941f0672ef8
Affiliate Marketing | | Gavin.Atkinson0 -
Adroll vs Adsense: Pro's and Cons
Hey everyone, Do you prefer Adroll or Adsense and why? What are some pros and cons of each?
Affiliate Marketing | | jhinchcliffe0 -
How much SEO benefit am I getting from 'affiliate' links?
Hi all, We run lots of different campaigns with affiliates and as such they have links on their websites pointing back to ours. I was keen to know how much 'link-juice' these kinds of links are passing back to our websites or how much SEO benefit we are getting from them. The links have "?=affiliate" in them. Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated!! Many thanks! Rob
Affiliate Marketing | | RobertHill0 -
What's an inexpensive way to maintain domain registration privacy?
Other than using a paid service like 'Domains by Proxy', is there a clever way to maintain my privacy with a domain registration w/o incurring the added annual cost of privacy service fees for every domain I own?
Affiliate Marketing | | Fly4Fun0 -
Affilate links - Google Panda 2.1
With the recent update from Google Panda would links from affiliate Coupon Sites now have an negative impact in Organic Rankings or site value? A reason for this question is because many Coupon Sites usually have poor content and a poor quality score. Thanks
Affiliate Marketing | | Tonyd230