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.
What is the danger of integrating different affiliate program widgets far under our core content?
-
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?
-
A thought about blocking competitors... Most people who land on your website are not going to purchase anything. If your conversion rate is 2% then 98% of the visits are not made by buyers. If you have a lot of content pages on your site that receive good traffic then your conversion rate (sitewide) is probably a lot lower.
Your competitors might be bidding good money to have their ads appear on your site. So, it might be a profitable idea to allow the ads and take a piece of your competitors' ad budgets - even if you might lose a few sales. When you make money from ads you don't have to do any work, but when you make money from sales you must do work - not only filling orders but also supporting customers in their use of the product.
We allow many competitors ads to appear on our site, especially those who because of prices or services are not real competitors. The only exception might be those who are extreme in their price discounting or on websites that are selling consumables and have a very high rate of repeat ordering.
At times we might be running low on stock or have employees out. At those times we might become very aggressive with ads, inserting them high on the page or above the header. These options are built into our design.
-
Thanks EGOL. Interesting.
Same goes for me. Performance of affiliate programs mostly was very disappointing in the past. In this case it is a complentary service which could add real user value and I do not want to risk losing visitors via adsense to competing services and filtering out competitors in adsense would just be too time consuming. -
I don't have any formal testing to back these observations. These are simply what I have noticed by experimenting with affiliate programs for twenty years.
** I believe that google strongly dislikes "thin affiliate" websites. These are sites that are monetized by affiliate links but that have very little real content or low value content. I believe that they are subjected to a "quality filter" that is more strict than the "Panda" algorithm.
** If you link to affiliate websites, expect those links to drive the affiliate site higher in the organic SERPs. So, if you are competing in the organic against the affiliate program site, you will empower them at your own expense.
** I have used Adsense on all of my websites since the first week that Adsense was available. I've learned how much money different ad positions on the page can produce with Adsense, then I have compared that to what affiliate ads produce in the same position. Adsense almost always make more money - not a little more money, a lot more money.
** I have also compared the amount of money that I can make using affiliate links to the amount of money that I can make by stocking the product and filling the orders myself. I make a lot more money filling the orders myself. There is no comparison.
** What I have not tested is how much can be earned by using hypertext affiliate links within the paragraphs of my content. In those locations, I am using links to sales pages on my own website or to articles on my site that are relevant to the links. I am confident that the sales links to products that I sell and fulfill myself will make a lot more money. I think that links to my own article content are valuable, but if they are more valuable than a small commission, I can't answer - but I'd rather keep the visitor on my own website.
-
Thanks Egol, good point.
Did you ever experience problems in google due to too many affiliate links? If so, how long did it take to recover in google rankings? -
I agree with James... but if you place all of these links at the bottom of the page you will not make much money.
Also, consider who persists to the bottom of your articles. They are your very best visitors and your potential evangelists and linkerati. Instead of blowing them off to an affiliate site, recommend more of your content to them.
And... when your affiliate links are higher up on the page your less interested visitors or your highly distractible visitors will use them and you will make money as they leave - probably a LOT more money.
All of my best producing ads are high on the page and the bottom of my page is where I recommend more content. I learned not to sell my most valuable visitors.
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
-
How to track Affiliate Clicks to Google Analytics
Hi, We would like to track the affiliate link clicks. Is there any way to track it from Google Analytic? Rajiv
Affiliate Marketing | | gamesecure0 -
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 -
How do you find Affiliate Links on your site that have not been nofollowed?
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?
Affiliate Marketing | | Zippy-Bungle0 -
Affiliate URLs Indexed in Google
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.
Affiliate Marketing | | ATIseo0 -
In what ways would an affiliate site be okay with Google?
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?
Affiliate Marketing | | bizzer0 -
Can anyone help me find the broadband ISP affiliate program I need?
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?
Affiliate Marketing | | bizzer0 -
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 -
Affilate Programs on Subdomains
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!
Affiliate Marketing | | Katharine0