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.
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?
-
Actually, screamingfrog should take care of it for you via the custom spider configuration. If you select "custom" under the "configuration" tab, you can drop in the html for the links you are looking for and it will give you a report with what pages it finds that code on.
For example, have screammingfrog search for the following snippet of code and it would find nofollow links pointing at mysite.com:
rel="nofollow" href="http://mysite.com
-
Hi there,
There's a few options for this outside of Screaming Frog, but they depend on how your site is developed.
My first thought would be to write a small script that looks for instances of this domain and checks if the link is nofollow, if not it inserts a nofollow tag. Depending on how your site is coded this could be risky, but I think you could do something nifty in PHP if you know the site and the language well. This is probably a quick-fix but not a massively sustainable solution as you'd be running a function each time - might get a bit laggy? It'd allow you to provide a quick-fix to the issue while you work on it separately, depending on how your site is developed.
An alternative you could do, if you use a system such as Wordpress would be to Export an RSS feed of content and use Notepad++'s regex find and bookmarking to highlight all instances of this domain within your page content where you don't use nofollow and replace with nofollow versions. This is time consuming, but would work. Also relies on Notepad++ not dying due to the size of the RSS feed!
Another alternative would be to use OSE and create an advanced report, which looks at only Follow links that come from your root domain and point to the affiliate domain in question. This method relies on Moz crawling your links and finding them - Might be tricky if those links are new.
You could also use Xenu to find only external links pointing out to that domain from your website and go through them manually. But that's not much fun either.
Hope there's something there that can be gleaned or used!
-
I am not sure if there is any link but I guess if you run screaming frog that will tell you how many of links that are going out contain follow and no follow tag but again for that you actually have to go URL by URL so this will not really going to cut any of your time.
I would love to hear from any other person in the community who is either using this kind of tool or know this kind of tool exist.
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
-
Person using expired domain and its links to drive traffic
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.
Affiliate Marketing | | HandyWoman1 -
Blocking external links in Robots.txt - need advice on Best Practice
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.
Affiliate Marketing | | Ben_Malkin_Develo0 -
Looking for a way to crawl and test validity of affiliate links at scale. Ideas?
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
Affiliate Marketing | | BradsDeals0 -
Sneaky redirect happening on my wordpress site.
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
Affiliate Marketing | | EdKim0 -
Affiliate Program: Does anyone know how to set this up?
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
Affiliate Marketing | | edward-may0 -
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 -
Google Analytics Tracking Pixels for Third-Party sites???
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?
Affiliate Marketing | | shawn810 -
How much link juice passes through urls with affiliate id's?
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?
Affiliate Marketing | | zeepartner0