Affiliate Links Dilemma

[fablau]

Hello everyone.

Our e-commerce website virtualsheetmusic.com has several hundreds affiliate incoming links, and many of them are "follow" links. I thought to redirect all incoming affiliate links to a "intermediate" page excluded by the robots.txt file in order to avoid any possible "commercial links" penalty from Google, but I now face a dilemma... most of our best referral links are affiliate links, by excluding those links from our back link profile could give us a big hit in terms of rankings.

How would you solve this dilemma? What would you suggest doing in this sort of cases?

[fablau]

Thank you Everett, I think what you wrote makes sense and I'll see what to do. I'll analyze again all my affiliate links and assess the risk of getting rid of those links. If I see I could risk losing rankings in some way, I'll consider to disable the stronger affiliates last.

Thank you again.

[Everett]

I can't make the decision for you, but am glad that you understand the situation enough to see your dilemma.

Google is pretty clear about their policy on followable affiliate links. Could you be ranking even better by getting rid of PR-passing affiliate links? Or would that ultimately harm your rankings? It depends on if those links are being seen as paid at the moment, and whether there is any type of penalty applied to the site. You'd probably know via GSC if there was a manual action / penalty but there could be an algorithmic one. If that's the case, you may improve rankings by removing them.

The fact that your affiliate program is in-house means you may be able to fly under algorithmic radars, so to speak, and that those links could be seen as legitimate. But they're not. Remember that and I think you'll be fine.

[fablau]

Thank you Everett, that's actually my "dilemma"... I understand the risks of both actions:

1. If I leave things how they are now, I could still benefit of any little juice coming from those links, but I could risk a penalization from Google because of that.

2. If I apply what you are suggesting, I will be safe from any possible penalization from Google, but I could lose any possible juice coming from those affiliate links.

Since from my back link profile it looks like most of our best referrals are affiliate links, I am very afraid to lose a lot of juice and consequently rankings if I disable those as you are suggesting. Data in my hands shows me a strong possibility on that (we have affiliates with a strong SEO profile), whereas I have almost nothing showing that those links are really penalizing me, that's why I have such an hard time to decide what to do.

Another option could be to keep the way it is just for those "strong" affiliate links, whereas disable all other ones...

How would you suggest acting in this kind of scenario?

[Everett]

If you have other websites linking to you because of an affiliate program the safest thing to do is make those links (from them to your affiliate program URL) go through an intermediate DOMAIN. You don't care if Google thinks that domain is odd because everyone page is blocked via Robots.txt Disallow: /. You don't even care if the affiliate sites are a little on the spammy end because they're linking to a totally different domain. And instead of submitting disavow files or requesting links be taken down, you can always just let that domain die off to kill ALL affiliate links to the site in one fell swoop if there is ever an issue. That's my recommendation. It's just safer that way.

If you want to retain the pagerank those links "may" be sending, you have to also accept the risk that comes with them.

[fablau]

Thank you Mike, I'll try to do that then.

We have also cleaned some suspect backlinks from some old-time-directories that could have had some weight for our latest loss. Even though we had links there for a long time (several years), we have considered the fact that Google could have updated his algorithm to account for those bad links in some way and discount most of our rankings.

To give you an idea of the loss I am talking about, have a look at our SEO visibility on searchmetrics.com:

http://suite.searchmetrics.com/en/research/?se=1&url=www.virtualsheetmusic.com

From the end of June we have begun to have a big drop in traffic, we have lost around 30% traffic from Google. That could be due to some algorithm change either content side (Panda) or link profile side (Penguin or similar?).  We had some Panda related issues in the past, so that was the first possible cause came up to my mind, but since we had very big drops on some major keywords of ours for which we built suspect links in the past, I also thought about a possible Penguin related problem.

Thank you for your thoughts on this!

[94501]

I like that idea. Keeps some of the upside (if there is any), but reduces the risk.

Do you have any other likely suspects besides the affiliate link thing?

The site seems like you could attract some editorial links. Like school music departments for .edus, right?

How bad a % search hit did you take in the last two months?

Best... Mike

[fablau]

Yeah, from my back-link profile, it looks like my top affiliates are among my best referring sites from the DA stand point, that's why I am worried to disavow and 302 redirect all of them.

Another solution could be to 302 redirect the smallest ones (most of them) and keep the way they are (301 redirect) the best ones (a few of them) without risking to lose any juice from those high DA affiliates.

What would you think about this kind of solution?

[94501]

If you want to be on the safe side. The only downside would appear to be that if the problem is not affiliate links, you've nofollowed and 302'd the value out of them. Maybe take a look at how much of your link profile is affiiate, non-affiliate and followed/nofolllwed to try and get a handle on what that maneuver might cost you, in the event the affiliate links aren't the problem. I kind of think G has already discounted them, so maybe no big loss.

[fablau]

Ok, thanks, and yes, We have already asked to all of our affiliates to add the rel="nofollow" tag, but most of them don't even bother to open our emails, and that's why I was thinking to a fast solution from our side t tackle this issue.

So, back to my original question, you would suggest doing what I was thinking already: either 302 redirect or redirect to a "intermediate" page disallowed inside the robots.txt all affiliate link requests without worrying of losing any possible (not-likely) juice value from those top affiliates of ours. Is that correct?

[94501]

Hi Fabrizo,

My suggestion is to contact all the affiliates, as you are, and get them to nofollow. Keep records of your efforts. I would consider 302ing, so you are not passing link value and therefor on the face of it not benefiting.

I wouldn't disavow them. I think the more likely scenario is that Google stopped counting them as editorial links... not a manual penalty (which you would probably have been notified of). G just figured it out and stopped giving you the boost from them.

Of course, there could be other problems unrelated to affiliate links. But with nofollows, 302s, and building new links.... how wrong could you be?

Best of Luck... Mike

[fablau]

Thanks Mike, sorry, I forgot to let you know that we have our own in-house affiliate program, so that affiliate links look like:

http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/page/?aff=affiliate_id

And then, all requests to that kind of URLs get 301 redirected to:

http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/page/

We haven't had any manual penalty so far, but we are afraid all those affiliate links could have some weight on the algorithmic side of Penguin or similar. We have experienced a pretty heavy drop in rankings in the last 2 months, and we are considering everything.

Back to my original question, I am trying to understand what's the best route to take: disavow those links or keep them the way they have been for the past 10-15 years?

Thank you again.

[94501]

Hi Fabrizo,

Are these links obvious affiliate links, like CJ.com or similar?

I'm saying that in my experience of working with dozens of sites with affiliate links pointing to them, I don't think it's a very big penalty risk to virtualsheetmusic.com.

If you've experienced a drop in organic search traffic over time, short of having a penalty notice from Google in hand, it's more likely that those links have been de-valued as non-editorial and thus taken some wind out of your sails. This might feel like a penalty, but really it's more like they just don't help like they used to.

As such, spending some time building some editorial links would be more to the point than an intermediate page.

Best... Mike

[fablau]

Thank you Mike for your reply.

So, are you suggesting to redirect all affiliates links to my mentioned "intermediate" page, or not? How would you proceed to mitigate the risk from both sides (possible Google penalization and possible rankings degradation from those affiliate links)?

Thank you again very much!

[94501]

Hi Fabrizio,

I don't think I would worry about it too much. Most of that risk, however little it is, is on the site linking to you. In Google's head, affiliate links are not editorially given links... more like (at worst/in concept) bought links, where the site gave the link in return for the affiliate income and therefor needs a nofollow.

Re: the risk for the linked-to site and as you know, affiliate links are not actually controllable by you. Also, Google has become decent at identifying affiliate networks and dismissing the value of them in the first place (assuming you're with some network), as mentioned here by Matt Cutts a while back: http://www.shoutmeloud.com/google-affiliate-links-seo.html

Finally, it looks like the site has enough other types of links that it's link profile is not crazily all affiliate links. Personally, I would put that energy into gaining some more editorially given links.

Best of luck, Fabrizio!

Mike