Can affiliate links benefit or hurt my seo?

[whiteonlySEO]

I have just signed up with a company to do affiliate marketing for my site. I am now in the process of  reaching out to publishers and seeing who will publish my link on their site. Is there any benefit in terms of seo for having these links, and can there be any potential downside to these links as well?

[TucsonAZWebDesign]

I did a bit of Affiliate marketing for Crakrevenue a few months back White, and one thing I advise that affiliates aren't going to tell you proactively is to add rel="nofollow" on your affiliate link.

My adult affiliate site was very easy to drive substantial traffic hitting the right hot spots, and I ranked it pretty quick. In short order, many of the affiliates I was advertising for had less authority than me.  So to avoid passing all that hard work to get authority to someone who was merely paying me for traffic, adding the nofollow tag was a quick fix.

You definitely WILL NOT get a benefit in SEO from an affiliate, that would just be to easy!

[paupastorlopez]

Hi again!

I think the question you are asking has been already answered in this community right here:

https://moz.com/community/q/is-affiliate-duplicate-content

The conclusion is to:

• OPTION 1) Avoid identical content on affiliate sites and demand affiliate sites to write their own original content.
• OPTION 2) Demand affiliate sites to canonicalize their urls with duplicated content to your urls.

Hope that helps

[whiteonlySEO]

Thank you so much for sharing this highly informative article. I have a question regarding the data feed description and duplicate content issue. If the product description on my website and the description in the product feed given to the affiliate site is identical can my site suffer due to this duplicate content or can this only negatively effect the affiliate site?

[paupastorlopez]

Hi,

I recommend you to read this article from Nicole Grodesky that explains very well the effects of affiliate marketing & links on SEO:

https://powerdigitalmarketing.com/blog/how-does-affiliate-marketing-affect-seo/

Greetings!