Affiliate Banner File Names?
-
Hello,
I have this certain website. Is has an affiliate/referral system. Within this system I am adding affiliate banners for our members to use in order to promote the site. They are also getting paid for each referral of course. There is a little box where they can copy and paste the code and it contains the image and a link to the home page with their referral ID.
So my question is, should I make these file names keyword rich? I am wondering if that would have any kind of SEO impact when they are linking to my website? Does it matter about the file name and ALT tag when it is on their website, but pointing to mine? Or will that only help their website? If it will not have any effect at all then I will just use the basic 300x300 type file name for them.
Thanks in advance,
Gary Darling III -
Hello Gary,
You should know that using followable affiliate links is against Google's Webmaster Guidelines, as they are viewed as paid links due to the monetary relationship between merchant and affiliate.
With that said, lots of people take the chance anyway and so long as you're aware of the risk...
I do think the alt attribute text contained within an image link (as well as the title attribute in the link) is considered by Google's algorithms. It probably would make a very small difference. However, I would not overdo it by stuffing either the file name or the alt text with lots of keywords. Your brand name, or the name of a product or service would probably be OK, but highly-targeted, non-brand alt text in banner ads that link to your site, especially since a lot of banner ads are site-wide placements (i.e. potentially thousands of pages on a single domain) are not a good idea.
If it were me I would include a nofollow tag in order to avoid any potential link-based penalties in the future, in which case you needn't worry about alt attributes or filenames beyond making them useful to the visitor.
-
the effect would probably be minimal
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
-
Skimlinks - Blogger Affiliate
Just to give you a bit of background - we are going out of our way to get bloggers to talk about and link (we are not paying for them) to our products. We recently noticed that a number of these bloggers have signed up to skimlinks and are using shortened URL's (fave.co/12345) and are no-following these (is this correct procedure?). It's a little awkward, as it's devaluing our PR teams work, as we aren't able to see the sites generating revenue, GA simply shows the affiliate number (skimlinks) and that's it. has anyone else had similar issues with skimlinks and if so how did you deal with them? Are the links they are "hijacking" harmful to our site?
Link Building | | PShez0 -
Best SEO practice to redirect affiliate link
Hello, I got an affiliate program on my website, that redirects the affiliate link to the main site like: site.com/ads/aff_code/ -> site.com/ (The redirect is done using a 301 status code.) On the redirect process the site stores a cookie to track the affiliate sale. Will Google and others SE follow this permanent redirect, transferring the relevance of this affiliate link to my main site? In other words, if an affiliate does something wrong (like spams), does the bad reputation will be transferred to my main site? Is there a better way to do that from a SEO standpoint? Thanks,
Link Building | | darkmediagroup0 -
Do inbound links to download .exe files improve SEO?
The site, (http://www.bartenderbarcodesoftware.com/) sells barcode software. They also provide free printer drivers on their site. During a recent domain change (before I started helping them), they began looking at their inbound links and found quite a few external sites linking to these download files. However, when someone clicks on the link on one of these sites (i.e. http://vvs-motor.com.ua/barcode-printer-drivers) it immediately begins downloading the file (i.e. http://www.seagullscientific.com/downloads/drivers/archive/7.2/7.2.4/Unimark_7.2.4.exe) without taking the visitor to the site. The owner would greatly prefer this traffic to engage with the site and is considering 301 redirecting those download links to an actual webpage. Question: Would this look suspicious to Google? Would this have a positive or negative effect on SEO? The last factor to consider is that many of these sites will likely just recreate the list based on the new links at some future point. Thanks for any help!
Link Building | | motosantiago0 -
Do incoming affiliate links help with SEO?
Quick question: If my affiliates promote an ebook via an e-junkie affiliate link that points to a sales page on my domain, will I get any SEO benefit from the links? Will Google see that the e-Junkie affiliate link 'hops' through to my domain name? i.e. Affiliate's website --> eJunkie link --> ebook landing page on my domain Thanks for your advice! Ian
Link Building | | internal-communication0 -
Should a site run it's own affiliate program to get inbound links?
I've recently signed an ecommerce client who runs their affiliate program through Commission Junction. If they were to bring their program in-house and eventually get all those affiliate links pointed to their domain, would those links be counted?
Link Building | | HunterW0 -
Backlinks point to files
Hello, Some competitors have which I am analyzing backlinks that point to files, eg. Dwg,. Fla. Pps. How is this possible? Thank you.
Link Building | | d2bcomunicacao0 -
When good domain names go bad
We have created a website to distribute a niche product. About a year ago, another vendor decided to drop the product and did not renew their domain name. We tried to acquire the domain name, but a cyber squatter picked it up. The old domain name had a few decent back links, and there was probably some value to us with a 301, but the cyber squatter was asking $8,000 and we didn't even bother countering such an absurd figure. The old domain continued to rank reasonably well for one or our search terms, even though it was just one page of spammy links. Well, this week it appears that Google Panda may have finally killed it off. Which brings me to a couple of questions. 1. In addition to a simple Google search, is there a way to determine if Google has killed a domain? 2. Assuming that Google has indeed killed the domain, is there any value in trying to 301 the domain should it ever be released? Best,
Link Building | | ChristopherGlaeser
Christopher0 -
Our link building strategy - affiliates and trophies
Hey guys, I just wanted to follow up on Rand's excellent whiteboard Friday: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/preventing-linkbased-penalties-whiteboard-friday It got me worried I think, but I'm not sure. We have a site where we are building up links in 2 ways: We have an affiliate set-up. A search widget in an i-frame, and below the i-frame a followed link pointing to the relevant page.
Link Building | | sichristie
The anchor text varies for each affiliate depending which region the affiliate comes from. We have awarded about 500 of our partners with trophies - i.e. - this partner has best reviews or most sales etc. Our partners are absolutely loving it.
The trophy is an image link which they can embed on their website, with alt text only mentioning our brand - that was an oversight ( I think). I wish the alt had been dynamically generated for each partner.
The trophies link to our partner pages.
So we are getting many links to our deeper pages, which is great.
The links I believe are relevant as they are coming from our partners websites and pointing to their relevant partner page on our website. So burning question is. Would you consider these links dodgy given Rands recent whiteboard friday post, and the recent farmer algorithm change? Many thanks, Croozie0