Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

  1. Home
  2. Digital Marketing
  3. Affiliate Marketing

Moz Q&A is closed.

After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.

Log in to post

Category: Affiliate Marketing

Do you work in affiliate marketing? Share the latest and get your questions answered.

  • fktos.tam.906n


    Hi everyone! Presently, our web developer team is redesigning our website(live football today). Right now, our website is ranking well on all our targeted keywords. Soon our new website are going to be live. I'm worried about our present ranking. Will it affect our current ranking? If yes, how can we maintain our SEO rankings? Thanks!

    | fktos.tam.906n
    0
  • dsfvy565

    This question is deleted!

    | dsfvy565
    0
  • TheFearlessForeigner


    I am getting redirect . vigilink links my blog clicks and I don't use the Viglink affiliate program. I have no idea where these links are coming from or how to get rid of them? I was told my another company that I have affiliate links with that they are overriding their affiliate links.

    | TheFearlessForeigner
    0
  • Techno247

    This question is deleted!

    | Techno247
    0
  • nomad_blogger


    Hi All, I have an issue on Google Search Console. It seems all my affiliate links are being crawled. Is this a bad thing? The reason I found out is that all but one link was flagged with a warming. It goes on to say that it was blocked by robots.txt. The strange thing is that I've not set any links to be blocked in robots.txt. Also, should affiliate links be nofollow?  I'm asking because I was recently sent this article by Yoast on how to properly cloak my affiliate links without using a plugin. https://yoast.com/cloak-affiliate-links/  In the method, they apply the nofollow and noindex rules to the links. I'm just a little confused on how to go about affiliate links the SEO friendly way.

    | nomad_blogger
    0
  • HandyWoman


    Hi, I know about people using expired domains to drive juice to their primary site but what about people using AN expired domain as their primary site (totally changing that site into a trashy affiliate-marketing vehicle)? The site I'm looking at is thegunzone.com.  It has, according to Semrush, almost 38K links.  It used to be a legit 17-year-old firearms hobby site, and this is what it originally looked like: http://web.archive.org/web/20120213184627/http://thegunzone.com:80/ Here is its last page before it closed and the domain purchased by the affiliate marketer: http://web.archive.org/web/20170315084035/http://www.thegunzone.com/ It closed around February of 2017, and some affiliate marketer bought it and all its backlinks.  However, all those backlinks, which were previously to various articles, are now directed back to those articles (which don't exist anymore) but the homepage, including Wikipedia links.  Here's an example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polygonal_rifling At the bottom, in the 7th Reference, there's a link to an article called " "Learning About Shooting . . ." but if you click on the original link, it just goes to thegunzone.com homepage.  Again, the site's totally different.   And there are just thousands of such backlinks to former articles that don't exist anymore but are redirected to this schlocky site's homepage (and it's passing its juice through too). My question is this:  this cannot be kosher with Google backlinking policies, right?  Is this prevalent on the internet?  Why hasn't thegunzone.com been found out and its rankings penalized yet?  And how do I report him?   I see tons of other sites using this basic strategy too on search results with various hunting keywords.  (Disclosure:  I do own a hunting/firearms blog, but I don't do any backlinking at all.) Any help would be sincerely appreciated.

    | HandyWoman
    1
  • Katarina-Borovska


    Hi guys, Situation: A website selling a mix of products from various vendors. When a product's Buy Now get clicked, it redirects to the vendor's website so the order can be placed there. Question: How do I track all these conversions reliably? Is there any shortcut? Also, what do they need to do technically to make it work, and will it send to my GA or is it any tool that will record these conversions? Does anyone do this actively? Thanks for ALL the ANSWERS!

    | Katarina-Borovska
    0
  • lcourse


    We have pages with lots of unique content that are ranking very well in google.
    I am now considering to add towards the end of the pages widgets from the booking.com affiliate program and also from the affiliate program of two other accommodtion sites. These affilliate widgets would be placed far beyond our core content in the bottom 15% of the page. Each widget will contain a large number of links to the different accomodation options that booking.com or others offer. In our context this information would be indeed very useful for our visitors. Shall I be concerned that our google rankings may suffer due to google perceiving our site as less quality (or google misinterpreting our intent to generate traffic to affiliate programs) ? If google rankings would be suffering, is this something we would normally see in a week (most of our pages are crawled daily by google)  and then recover in a week when we would remove the widgets or would this generally be something that would affect the ranking over the course of a month or more? Shall I be concerned abou link dillution since my pages would now have a lot of links pointing to the affiliate sites, which could devalue my internal links? Any thoughts?

    | lcourse
    0
  • Benavest


    Hello, I would like to make a bunch of duplicate pages of my site's Home Page, that way affiliates of mine can have a page of their own with links specialized to themselves littered throughout the page. What's the best practice going about this without jeopardizing domain authority from tons of duplicate content signals firing off?

    | Benavest
    0
  • Edward_Sturm


    This is only meant to be a discussion. Is he legit? Is he too blackhat and the next update may make him a lot less relevant? Is he worth paying attention to?

    | Edward_Sturm
    0
  • Ben_Malkin_Develo


    I look after an affiliate site that is doing quite well in the search rankings. We've been doing a review of our practices and one thing that has cropped up is our robots.txt. In it, we disallow Google from crawling external links. This used to be best practice in the affiliate industry a couple of years ago, but I wanted to know if this is still the case, and what the implications are if we were to: a/ leave it as is? b/ allow crawling? Thanks in advance.

    | Ben_Malkin_Develo
    0
  • KasperK


    Hi moz fans!
    I'm working on some client sites.
    They have a lot of products, which they are selling through their webshop and two affiliate sites.
    But I can't stop wondering:
    The affilate sites are using the same product descriptions and images - Will Google see that as duplicate content?
    And if so.. How can I prevent that? The two affiliate sites are well etablished and huge sites, so I guess they know what they are doing.. Is there some way I can check it? When I do a google search, whit the "My product description text", I'm getting some different results: Sometimes all three sites appear (main site, and affilate) Sometimes it's only the affilates Sometimes it's only the main site. So to make it short:
    If i'm using affliate, will Google see it as duplicate content?
    How do I check it, and how do I prevent it? Thank you!

    | KasperK
    0
  • BradsDeals


    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

    | BradsDeals
    0
  • EdKim


    On my site, gosandiego.com I have a couple links at the top which directly link to another site. However, I noticed that when I click on the link, it seems to go to another site for a few milliseconds before being redirected to the correct destination. It took a little while but I was able to take a screenshot of the sneaky redirect. It starts awin1.com/awclick.php... I am fairly sure that awin1.com belongs to Affiliate Window, an affiliate marketing company much like Commission Junction but smaller. I just had someone email about my site and said the link redirected on him too but his browser got sent to viglink.com I was wondering, Has someone hijacked my site or has someone hijacked my browser or is it something else? Thanks 0LBwUoc

    | EdKim
    0
  • gamesecure


    Hi, We would like to track the affiliate link clicks. Is there any way to track it from Google Analytic? Rajiv

    | gamesecure
    0
  • edward-may


    Hi Guys Does anyone know how I can make a affiliate programme on my website eg - I have a sales person in two of our local regions and I want to find a way I can track any sales made through them via my website so I can pay them their commission. Any advice around this, the website is wordpress! Cheers Justin

    | edward-may
    0
  • lfrazer


    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!

    | lfrazer
    0
  • unikey


    Hi, I am wondering what if any affiliate management applications are being used out there. Anyone using Shareasale... I am looking into them.

    | unikey
    0
  • EcommerceSite


    I work for an ecommerce company and would like to setup some sort of affiliate marketing similar to Amazon. 1. If someone was referred to our site and they made a purchase we would pay out. 2. If we referred a user to someone else's page and they made a purchase we would get paid. I looked into http://www.commissionfactory.com/ but wasn't sure if that would meet my needs. Does anyone have any recommendations?

    | EcommerceSite
    0
  • Zippy-Bungle


    We've just signed up to an affiliate scheme because we were sending links to them because we thought their product was valuable to our users. So we now have to go through and nofollow all of these links over 100's of pages. Is there any way that do a crawl of the site to identify all links to a particular site and tell me what page they are on and whether they are nofollow/follow?

    | Zippy-Bungle
    0
  • NHA_DistanceLearning


    Hi guys, I'm puzzled because of my affiliate campaign URLs not showing up properly in my Google Analytics reports. I'll try to explain what I did and I hope some of you can provide advice on how to proceed from there on. What do I want to do?
    Actually, what I want to do is quite simple. I tagged a few URLs for Google Analytics to show up in my campaign reports. I used the URL builder to do so. Example: http://www.nhad.de?utm_source=affiliate&utm_medium=zanox&utm_content=banner&utm_campaign=105x139. Is that the entire URL?
    Uhm, no. Because of the active de-duplication script on our website, I need to put some characters in front of it: **www.nhad.de/affiliate.aspx?NETWORK=ZANOX&NEXTURL=**http://www.nhad.de?utm_source=affiliate&utm_medium=zanox&utm_content=banner&utm_campaign=105x139. Yikes. Yes, I know. What do I see?
    Basically, when I paste the above url and run it in (for example) Chrome, only this shows up in my browser: www.nhad.de/?utm_source=affiliate. In my Analytics reports, the campaign URL is not recognised, just the source in my traffic report. The medium is indicated with 'not set'. What am I doing wrong, and what can I do to make my campaigns appear in Analytics? Best, Bas

    | NHA_DistanceLearning
    0
  • juris_l


    Hello, I've question regarding affiliate partner generated links.Company www.example.com has a affiliate program. Partner www.example2.com links to the company site with affiliate link www.example.com/?affid=xxxx in banner, article etc. As I understand these type of links could hurt our Company site, so I asked partners to use rel="nofollow" in all links where they link to us usign ?affid=xxxx in url. To be 100% sure that I did the right thing I decided to post here my question. Could these type of links hurt our Company site? Regards,
    Juris

    | juris_l
    0
  • shawn81


    I'm looking at starting a few Adwords campaigns (for search only) and targeting a niche where there is very little competition. Lets assume I get a very good CTR on my ads. How much could I expect to pay per click? Does Adwords have any minimums CPCs? Or is it actually possible to get penny clicks in Adwords?

    | shawn81
    0
  • JonsonSwartz


    Hello, One of my clients wants to know how many leads he gets from the organic search, he has Affiliate ID's for the Social media and for his affiliate websites, but now he wants to know how many leads he gets from the organic search. According to his affiliate program there are some leads without affiliate ID's but not all of them from the organic search big part of those leads are from "refer a friend program" and leads that were entered the system manually. Is there anyway in Google Analytics or any other program that can track the leads who come to my client website from searching for the brand name or concepts/long tails and registered/opened a new account ?

    | JonsonSwartz
    0
  • Katharine


    Hello SEO Community! We are launching an affiliate program and for CMS flexibility the preferred, development solution, is putting the affiliate program on a subdomain. Financial incentive affiliate programs "don't pass link value." Lets pretend they do for this situation 🙂 Here is the example: company website= example.com affilate website= affiliate.example.com Proposed affilate program: affilate.example.com/12345 -->301 redirects --> example.com There are multiple business services so sometimes the 301 redirect looks like this: affilate.example.com/23457 -->301 redirects ---> example.com/busines-service-foo affilate.example.com/23457 -->301 redirects ---> example.com/busines-service-bar note: The business services provided are very different. As a result, these links will be placed on very different types of website. To keep contextually relevant links in the 301 redirect should the affiliate look like this?: affilate.example.com/busines-service-foo/23457 -->301 redirects ---> example.com/busines-service-foo affilate.example.com/busines-service-bar/23457 -->301 redirects ---> example.com/busines-service-bar Thanks in advance for your feedback! If anyone can point me in the direction of an ideal way to set up affiliate programs that would be great. Especially regarding: canonical tag, # in url, 301 Any arguments about keeping the the affiliate off a subdomain are also very welcome. Thanks!

    | Katharine
    0
  • bizzer


    I have a couple sites that deal with broadband internet access, and I'm looking to monetize beyond adsense. I'd like to sign up for some affiliate programs from internet service providers like Charter, CenturyLink, Comcast, etc. I found a couple affiliate programs but I am having no luck at all figuring out the programs that so many other websites are involved with.  In about every case, the user is able to enter in their address and then a search is performed, returning programs available at their location.  The programs I've found just do the traditional ad click-throughs for a possible commission. Can anyone enlighten me what kind of programs they are using?

    | bizzer
    0
  • ATIseo


    We have an active in-house affiliate program which has a create-a-link function where affiliate, as in most affiliate programs, can build links back to our content to produce sales. The problem that I am seeing is that some of the affiliate URL versions are being indexed in Google rather than the original page. For instance.. http://www.ourdomain.com/page_start.aspx?affnum=F025212&Start_Page=RaceCar&referrer=createlink is outranking... http://www.ourdomain.com/racecar This presents 2 issues for us. First, this presents duplicate content issues obviously. Second, we pay our affiliates a portion of the sales so, in order to maximize profitability, we'd like the indexed pages to be the original version. What's the best way to handle this? I want to make sure that affiliates continue to get credit for links from their sites but search engine links should go to the original versions.

    | ATIseo
    0
  • SeeSharp1


    Hello, Last week I got the glorious idea to put amazon affiliate links on my website. I didn't put a rel=nofollow on them or deindex the pages they were on. Precisely I put some reviews and 10 different amazon links on one page and I put that into my navigation so all inner pages were linking to that page. When Google crawled my page again, I had a 60% traffic drop. 3 days later when I found out what caused this (amazon links) I completely removed the site containing those links and removed all links to that page from my site. Now my rankings are still down, will my site recover from this or is it lost? And how long would you think it'll take?

    | SeeSharp1
    0
  • jhinchcliffe


    Hey everyone, Do you prefer Adroll or Adsense and why? What are some pros and cons of each?

    | jhinchcliffe
    0
  • tennisexpress


    Question: If the domain registrar owner info is the same on two websites, will Google/other search engines discredit any linking between the two sites when calculating page rank? We have two company sites. One is our main ecommerce domain which we have been linking into from information domains in the past. We recently cut ties with the company that hosted them for us and wish to host them ourselves to preserve the inbound traffic. We are worried, however, that the traffic will be discredited now that we own both domains. Thanks for looking!

    | tennisexpress
    0
  • shawn81


    Hello, Does anyone know if it is possible to track an event on a third party site and have it post back to your Google Analytics account? For example, I am sending traffic to a partners site and I want to know if that traffic I am sending them will hit a specific point of conversion (a sale) and I'm wondering if it possible to place a tracking pixel on their thankyou.html page that gets recorded in my google analytics?

    | shawn81
    0
  • bizzer


    I know Google has slammed affiliate sites hard. But affiliate marketing can be a real business and had an idea for one, but I would like to know if ALL affiliate sites are looked at as evil in Google's eyes, or if it's just those with thin and duplicate content in the product descriptions. I know they want brands to come up ahead of affiliates of that brand, and that makes sense.  If I sold Acme Widgets products, Acme Widgets itself should come up ahead of my site.  But what if the site sold widgets in general, with the term widgets not a branded keyword? If all product descriptions are unique and well-written content, on a site that is  high quality, would it still be downgraded by Google just because there are affilate links in it? I guess overall the question could be boiled down to, are affiliate sites hit because they have horrible content or because they have links to affiliate programs in them?

    | bizzer
    0
  • xoffie


    Hi Some advice appreciated.  Started working on a site and found out that they are giving their unique content to their affiliates (an XML feed so appearing on another domain). In this case, if they want to provide the data like that, how can we protect ourselves? Should we use author tags in our html, is that necessary? Is there any fix other than "stop doing that and give them different content"? Thanks

    | xoffie
    0
  • Gamer07


    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).

    | Gamer07
    0
  • ocelot


    Hi No not used adwords before as our onsite SEO was going well - with long tail terms ranking well to product detail pages. On Sunday we tried to set up an adwords ad as it wasgoing to be used for the forthcoming launch of a new product. - - PS Vita I think it is being classified as a bridge page although other price comparison sites such as kelkoo and pricerunner gocompare, travelsupermarket etc all seem to get through and have ads on Google? More interesting though is since the ad was disapproved my organic search results have disappeared? (which have all been white hat) Coincidence perhaps or something more sinister from Google??  One for you Randfish perhaps?

    | ocelot
    0
  • zeepartner


    hi we can get a valuable link with the desired anchor text from a news site. the destination url would be something like www.site.com/product. but in order to track conversions, our sales team would like to add an affiliate id to the url, so that it would look like this: www.site.com/product?sess_affiliate=ta how much link juice would a link to this affiliate url pass? would we be shooting our wad by linking to the ?sess-URL instead of the original URL?

    | zeepartner
    0
  • Grumpy_Carl


    Hi all Mind it I pick some of your brains for a second opinion on something.... The current situation is thus: I have a fashion website which has over 10,000 free articles and videos, support forums with thousands of posts and user blogs. Also on the site is an affiliate store which is built using datafeedr. The store has about 90,000 products from hundreds of retailers. The goal of the site being a one stop fashion community site where people can get information, chat with other fashion fans and then use the store to search all the fashion sites at once. The problem I am having is despite endless seo work it is proving very difficult to rank the domain for even terms with low competition (We are used to ranking our clients for very competitive terms, often with several hundred million competitors including government websites, bbc, wiki etc). After testing we have come to the conclusion that it's the duplicate content in the store which is hindering our progress. Despite the exact layout of the store being unique, there is no original content on the product pages. There, we have decided to remove the store from the current url and on to it's own site. The question we have is would putting it on store.domain.com still hinder the main site? I recall reading that google are considering the subdomains and root domain as one these days, or if we were to put it on samedomainname.net would google then consider us to be sending users to another website? From a branding point of view I would favour the store.domain.com approach but the .net approach could be easier. Finally, if we were to move the store we have about 45,000 pages indexed which would all return 404's so I guess it would be best to set up 301 redirects from the old url to the new? Many thanks

    | Grumpy_Carl
    0
  • reallygoodstuff


    It's been years since I've had a discount I could offer over PPC. I remember when I was a young search monkey, that companies would offer the coupon code directly in the ad copy. However, an inspection of ads on various queries, I don't see anyone doing this. I want to, because of course a concrete offer should certainly help CTR right?  But, not finding any referent examples of other companies using the coupon code freaks me out. Is there a drawback to posting the code directly?

    | reallygoodstuff
    0
  • reallygoodstuff


    Haven't worked with discount codes in years. Researching the ad copy I found very few sites putting the promo code directly in the ad copy. I thought this was a standard practice for increasing response. Do you know why companies with active promo codes don't use them in Adwords copy?

    | reallygoodstuff
    0

Got a burning SEO question?

Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


Start my free trial


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!

  • Support

    Connect on product support and feature requests.

Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.