Important question on affiliate links
-
The website I am working on is http://www.treadmillreviews.com. If you look at any of our affiliate links, they all have an href value of # or something that keeps the user on the page. However, there is an onclick="window.open('affiliate link URL')" code in them that has the affiliate link open in a new window.
This website was set up to "hide" the affiliate links in essence this way. I just tried to make a PPC campaign in Google. Got shut down in about 20 minutes for being a "bridge page."
Now, all of the content is original and not copied from anywhere. Supposedly Google could not see these links. Yet we got labeled how we did, and now I"m thinking it is causing rankings to hurt a bit.
My question is, should I change how all of the links are set up? Should I make the href value be the affiliate link? It is a redirect like CJ.com uses. Should I nofollow those affiliate links? What is the best way to handle this problem? All help is appreciated.
-
Here's my opinion;
Google's spiders will have more difficulty interpreting and following affiliate links using the onclick="window.open... method, but that doesn't mean that they can't. To my knowledge they can follow these links and even pass juice between them. Although I'm not sure that it would affect your rankings and so whether changing the links would do anything; after all, they're outbound links. If you were to nofollow them, then you would still loose the same amount of link juice, it just wouldn't flow to the trading sites.
On a separate note, as you know; Google's problem seems to be that you're acting as a 'middle man' from the sites who are actually selling the treadmills. From the odd story I've heard, unless your site is bringing something 'unique' to the equation then they don't like to have it promoted in their advertising space, they prefer to have the actual seller paying for the advertising. One way I've heard to get around this is to have a PPC specific landing page that concentrates purely on the review side of things, however I'm not sure whether your site would be flagged by them now or not.
-
Yeah I hear that, in spite of the site owner thinking the affiliate links were hidden from Google so that they didn't look like affiliate links, we still got the shaft anyway.
My question then is in the post-panda world, since Google recognizes us as an affiliate site, are we getting hurt organically for that? Should we nofollow the links? Change them from javascript?
-
Hey, I read about this somewhere previously and Google has a policy of no PPC for what it considers Bridge Pages:
From: https://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=46675
Bridge pages: Pages that act as an intermediary, whose sole purpose is to link or redirect traffic to the parent company
Had a bit of a dig and this was the post I read a while back, sure of it:
http://www.curtsnow.com/googles-bridge-page-policy-dont-ask-dont-tell/
Hope that helps buddy.
Marcus
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
-
Does Canonical Tag passes link juice to the original URL?
We are using Canonical tags at almost all the pages of our eCommerce website. We have various sorting options like "High to Low", "Best Sellers", etc., due to this page URLs get change with some dynamic URL parameters. To avoid duplicity, we are using canonical tag on each page which point to the original url. Also, we are using IBM Coremetrics to track traffic and conversions, but to measure referral traffic in Coremetrics, we have to add tracking parameters in the URL. So, while link building we need to share URLs with Coremetrics tracking parameters in the URL, but the canonical of this page is pointing to the original URL. Suppose we have a Page that needs to be shared with Coremetrics tag: domain.com/category-name/?cm_mmc=Referral_-xyz--izUPF8VmRng--3 This Page has the canonical tag pointing to the original url: domain.com/category-name/ My question is if the URL: domain.com/category-name?cm_mmc=Referral_-xyz--izUPF8VmRng--3 got shared on other websites, will it pass link juice to the original URL: domain.com/category-name.
Affiliate Marketing | | Ramendra.Singh0 -
Affiliate marketing: yes or no?
Hello, A colleague recently asked me about affiliate marketing for our clients, and my answer for a few years now has been emphatically "no", because I had not seen it done in positive way. How does everyone weigh in affiliate marketing, and what companies and/or software would you suggest? For example, is http://www.admedia.com/ a reputable source? I see lots of bad reviews on these guys. Any thoughts, suggestions, etc would be extremely valuable. Thanks in advance!
Affiliate Marketing | | lfrazer0 -
Does having affiliates hurt seo?
one of my clients has a TON of affiliates out there building links back to his site all with the ?ref=AFFILIATENAME tracking string does google understand this and not count these links or is there a way to nofollow all links with this tracking string? just wondering how big companies rank well and still have thousands of affiliates building links on all kinds of properties using all kinds of methods thanks
Affiliate Marketing | | Ezpro90 -
What is the negative effect of getting affiliate links to your domain?
Are the negative effects of affiliate links to your domain bigger than the positive effects? Is it better to use a subdomain for your affiliate campaigns? (Because of linkprofile no follow links or time on page effects?) Thanks for responce!
Affiliate Marketing | | ltom0 -
Looking for a nice way to add an amazon affiliate store to my site
We are often asked what our favorite toys, books, resources, etc, are and I want to make a page(s) with our top resources that is a nice clean amazon affiliate store. Are there are good resources anyone knows of to do this? (I'm using a wordpress blog by the way....perhaps there is a plug in?) Thanks.
Affiliate Marketing | | NoahsDad0 -
SEO and Affiliate Links
Hello, We run a travel related website and we started to run our own affilate newtwork to promote the sales of our products. At the moment the affilate links pont to a spacific affilate url in order to tack conversions : abcweb.com/affiliate/nameqaz I'm wondering how is the best way to run a private affilate programm considering SEO: Is there a way yo benefit from those links ? What are the best strategies to do this? If yes, Is there any benefit from redirecting 301 those links to the original page (the one accesible to google and the one we want to rank for) or is it better to use a king of canonical method. Thanks a lot for sharing you experiences , giving your opinion and indicate resources. Best Regards Daria
Affiliate Marketing | | stereo690 -
How many affiliate links is considered too many?
Hi, Let's say you have great reviews for 50 products and some of these products do have affiliate links on review pages. And then you have user scores and you come up with a top 20 product list sorted by user scores. Now if you have the list of top 20 products on one page and all these products have an affiliate link (with nofollow relation and a 301 redirect) on the same page with only a couple of images and a summary of the review linked to the review pages, would this still be considered as what Google calls a "bridge page"? Would it be better to still generate the top 20 list but rather link to review pages only? (to avoid too many affiliate links on one single page).
Affiliate Marketing | | Gamer070 -
Affiliate for SEO
Hello, If you get bad websites as affiliates through share a sale can that hurt your seo? Thanks Tyler
Affiliate Marketing | | tylerfraser0