Do affiliate links count for Google?
-
Hi, I have been reading about affiliate links - links with a tracking code in the URL (i.e.: www.xxx.com/?aff=123456) and I can't find a definitive answer. Does Google count them as natural links or maybe they do not even pass any link juice?
And if they don't, what if I get a natural link from a website (without tracking code) and later that website becomes my affiliate? Would the first link still count?
I guess that there can't be any certainty about all this, but I would love to know your expert opinions
Thanks!
-
Again, not totally clear cut. Depends if the links are within the content, site wide, above or below an affiliate link, withing one or several pages.
I would err on the side of assuming that if there's affiliate and non-affiliate links then the clean links won't count for as much.
-
Wow! Thanks for this answer! But I still have one doubt: if an affiliate gives me a mix of affiliate links and clean links, would the clean links still count?
-
Fairly complex to get decent value out of affiliate links and technically I believe Google wants you to nofollow affiliate links, so gaming them for more positive SEO value could wind up with you getting in a little trouble.
The blog post Atul linked to is a good place to start, however I think if you were really serious about it there's a lot more depth you can go into.
In your example you can start by ignoring the aff parameter in webmaster tools and I assume you'll canonicalise the page.
It's possible to get affiliates to give you a clean link, then drop a cookie on users based on the referral header. This has the advantage of requiring no work on the affiliates side (they simply link to anywhere on your site as normal) but it's very easy to game for other affiliates. If there's money to be made a lot of people are going to take advantage of it. A variation on this is you can use # links and then interpret them server side (so affiliate links to example.com#aff=123456 convert to example.com/?aff=123456). Again that's game-able.
A possibility would be to set up affiliate landing pages that override cookies (a force vs a default), so that affiliates can link into this page cleanly and visitors get cookied at that stage. You would then have a stripped down navigation to sections of your site you most wanted to promote. You'd have to make this page accessible to search engines though, which means there's a possibility of that page showing in SERPS. On the other hand it could also give you a chance to be in the SERPS for their brand if you do it right
Another, somewhat dodgy (all right, actually dodgy), thing you can do is look at a list of your affiliates and see who's not bringing in many sales, especially those with high traffic. You can then offer to match or beat their affiliate payments for their continued endorsement with a clean link.
Assuming you manage to impliment a decent solution something you'll need to overcome is that affiliates are increasingly masking their affiliate links to keep the link juice. See this post for an example - http://yoast.com/affiliate-links-and-seo/ - though it's possible to do the same thing without the plugin. No real solution to this beyond interacting with the affiliate and discussing it with them.
Also affiliates may not be too happy about providing SEO friendly links as it makes it harder for them to rank/earn. One solution could be to offer additional rewards for SEO friendly links over traditional links.
A small negative to solving this if you have a widespread affiliate program is that you could suddenly have a lot of low value links pointing into you, diluting to a degree some of your stronger links. I'm not saying that getting a whole bunch of links could ever be bad, per se, but, depending on your niche, I still think some affiliates operate in 'bad neighbourhoods'. I wouldn't worry about it too much, but if possible roll these links out instead of flipping a switch.
The only real concern is if you then revert or change your affiliate program. I'm 95% sure Google doesn't care if you pick up a whole bunch of links quickly, but if you LOSE a whole bunch of links quickly you're going to set off some alarm bells. Although I could be significantly overthinking your question, just the sort of things that go through my mind
If I think of anything else I'll update.
-
There is a post at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/getting-seo-value-from-your-affiliate-links
This should be helpful.
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
-
AllTop Linking Me to Other Sites Feeds, Webmasters Reporting Lots of Broken Links
I submitted my blog to All Top awhile ago and something seems to be wrong with their feed. They're sending people to mysite.com/truth-o-meter.com/this-is-a-post. It's not just truth-o-meter either. I'm getting links that are supposed to go to all kinds of political blogs. As a result, I'm getting a ton of broken links reported on Google Webmasters. I couldn't find any real support option on alltop.com, and when I log in, there are no sites for me to manage. Instead, I resubmitted the site with the correct feed address and in the comments, I mentioned the problem. All I got was a message saying the site was rejected. I believe because I already added the site. But I'm thinking they didn't pay attention to the comments. (In fact the message may have gone through an auto-filter considering how quickly it was rejected.) Is there a way to solve this? Is this a situation in which I would use the disavow tool? If All Top continues to create bad links, how do I stop the issue once and for all? Thanks!
Link Building | | eglove0 -
Internal linking anchor text with automated ASP.NET link building
Hi Everyone I really need some help here, the problem I have must be one that many have. I have a simple e-commerce style website so 1 product page can in fact get 40-50 internal links to it. These links come from a mixture of: 1. The parent category pages that the product sits on (Rugged PDA) and in turn the 10 filter pages of this category page (Rugged PDA, ordered by battery size). 2. Alternative product list on other product pages, So many products link to each other as alternatives. From Google analytics we can see that visitors like to browse product to product seeing 5 alternatives on each page with titles like "Smaller", "more rugged" etc. 3. Manufactuer pages, so we have a link to each product from each manufacturer home page where we talk lots about each manufacture we resell. We also have links from images used in the website. So its a nice usable website but we're finding that Google is still telling us in Webmaster tools that it thinks some links are dubious and we're trying to find out why. We only now have 190 external links to the website, most are internal and from the website or our blog on a subdomain. The problem we think is that we generate the category and products pages all dynamically so the anchor text is looking the same. Will this potentially create issues for us? Dave
Link Building | | Raptor-crew0 -
Do links from between common sites you run count as "bad" links?
Hi everyone,
Link Building | | AMA-DataSet
Iv recently been asked to review a group of sites. There are 3 sites, each of these sites has a link to the other two sites within the footer or the navigation.
These site are about a similar topic each provides a different perceptive or aims at a specific section of the industry so its not like the links are to irreverent sites. However because the links are in a global section they are repeated thousands of times on each site and count for a large proportion of the link profile to each site, I don't think this is good practise and I want to remove them or at least add a no-follow but my client insists they are relevant to each other and doesn't not want the links removing. What would be best in this situation? remove them? no-follow them? or leave them? Thank you in advance,
Liam0 -
Do No follow links from social media platforms transfer authority or value when they link to third party websites?
With social media playing a bigger role in SEO (since the Panda, Penguin updates etc) and how search engines rank sites now, does anybody know why Twitter for instance has 'no follow' when I check my client's websites under 'inbound links' on Open Site Explorer?
Link Building | | caroline19770 -
Outsourcing Link Building - What Low LEvel Links Should One Start With 1st
Outsourcing Link Building - What Low Level Links Should I start with if my interest is get free immediate traffic as a direct result from placing links or what ever out there and what should I outsource 1st and why ? What questions should I ask my self that will help me determine where I should start with low level links ?
Link Building | | helpwanted0 -
Reciprocal links
Hi SEOmoz Pros, We have vendors from whom I was hoping to get links. To make it more enticing to them I was planning to select a small number of vendors (with good site metrics-PA, DA, PR) and create a "Featured Vendor" module on some pages that would link back to the vendor's site as well--thereby created reciprocal links. I was planning to only have one vendor to a page and only for the pages that we are targeting locally. My hope is to help boost the ranking of those pages. Is it okay to offer our vendors to link back to their site or should I ask for a one-way link back to our page and pitch it as exposure for their brand?? Lastly, does Google penalize for these types of links? Thanks!
Link Building | | AC_Pro1 -
Linking to Google Place page??
I'm wondering if anybody has tried and had success in improving search rankings by creating links to Google Place pages. What say you?
Link Building | | bdiddy0