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,
-
Wonderful, thank you Everett.
-
I'll mark this as answered and will head over to the newer thread.
-
Thank you Everett, good points!
I have opened another thread on this topic (I didn't expect you to reply on this old one!) where I am discussing about possible solutions for inbound affiliate links:
https://moz.com/community/q/affiliate-links-dilemma
It looks like my best solution would be to leave the way it is, maybe changing 301 redirects with 302? How would you suggest tackling this issue... or would you suggest just "ignoring" and leave the way we all have done, with a simple 301 redirect to the "clean" URL?
Thank you again.
-
Fabrizo,
It was a good point for you to bring up. The truth is, I don't know what Google's stance is on stuff like this these days because they constantly change it and you can read opposing things straight from Google in two or more different places. Also, I don't think Google cares about the user as much as they say when it comes to our sites because they make it difficult for us to rank well while also providing rich JS-based, interactive experiences. So thinking of the users on a big affiliate site, the best UX would be to show them the domain they're about to visit (e.g. Amazon.com) but Google doesn't like sites monetized this way (it seems) so we have to obfuscate what we're doing, which is B.S. since obviously the users like the site or they wouldn't be using it. This is all about Googlebot not keeping up with web dev technology. Maybe they should spend less time on self-driving cars and VR goggles and more time on that.
Personally, I would not have a bunch of href links on my site pointing to an internal folder that is blocked in the robots.txt file. I "may" use javascript links and then obfuscate the javascript somehow, but Googlebot doesn't like when you keep it from rendering JS and you'll start to see errors come up in GSC and elsewhere that you're blocking content from being rendered. Does that impact rankings? Hard to tell.
-
Yes, thank you Everett, I read about that, and I agree with you that that would be a bullet-proof solution.
I wanted just to check if what Google states now days would actually work, I couldn't see that mentioned on this thread before. But looks like you'd agree with Google on that, right?
Thank you again!
-
Fabrizo,
I was suggesting going through an intermediate domain, as opposed to just an intermediate page. There is more protection there.
-
I know this is a rather old thread, butI am wondering if anything is changed since this topic was discussed.
I see Google suggesting redirecting links to an intermediate page blocked by robots.txt to avoid schemes penalties:
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66356?hl=en
Ideas on that?
-
It is clear to me now.
At the moment, I changed the redirect to 302 and blocked the /ads/ folder on the robots.txt. But I will surely proceed setting up a new domain for the affiliate traffic.
Thanks,
-
Hello Henrique,
2. I mean putting /ads/ on a totally separate domain (e.g. youraffiliateprogram.com/ads/) which then redirects to yoursite.com. This way you can totally block that entire domain if you wanted to. When an affiliate links to youraffiliateprogram.com/ads/pageID the user who clicks on the link will get redirected to yoursite.com/pageID.
This set up has the advantage that you can block the entire affiliate program domain from being indexed in the robots.txt file if you wanted to, or you could try to use a 301 redirect and benefit from the links - until it stops working or you get penalized, at which point it you could block the affiliate program domain in the robots.txt, and/or change the redirects from 301 to a 302 rather quickly.
To answer your last question, yes you could simply change the redirect from a 301 to a 302 and that should solve the issue at the final landing page level, but since a lot of affiliates are still linking directly to your domain prior to getting redirected it could still cause issues. For example...
Affiliate A links to YourSite.com/ads/123 without using a rel nofollow tag in the link. This is still a link to your site from them, regardless of what happens next.
YourSite.com/ads/123 proceeds to 302 redirect the visitor to YourSite.com/123. The won't bass the pagerank on to your landing page, but it did nothing to stop the fact that you have a direct, followable affiliate link going to your site.
If you put in your Terms for affiliates that they have to use a nofollow tag in links to you, and you supply the nofollow tag in the code when they are "building" links from within your affiliate system, you should be ok. You may also want to block /ads/ in the robots.txt file just to be sure if you're going to take this route.
-
Hello,
1. I will add the nofollow rel to our affiliate links, but this will only solve part of the problem. Many just grab the URL and build their own links.
2. You mean when someone hits site.com/ads/, gets redirected to subdomain.site.com and than to my main site.com? 301 redirects won't transfer the page rank to the page they are redirecting to?
What about changing the status code from 301 to 302 when redirecting from site.com/ads/ to site.com? Will this transfer the page rank? Any other status code that seems more suitable in this situation, like see other (303)?
-
Blocking the /ads/ directory via the robots.txt file is not going to stop your site from being associated with affiliates who link to you. The best thing you can do in this case would be one of two things:
1. Ensure all affiliates are linking with a rel = "nofollow" attibute in the href tag (i.e. nofollow their links). You can provide the nofollow tag in the link code that they copy to make it easy for them.
Or
2. If you are trying to get some pagerank out of your affiliate links, but want to be able to react quickly in the event of a link-based penalty as a result of this practice, you could have affiliates link through another domain, which then 301 redirects to your landing page. This way you can kill off all the links simply be cutting the redirect (or changing it to a 302, or blocking Google from following the redirect with a tactic similar to the robots.txt block described above...) on the other domain instead of having to disavow a bunch of affiliate links, or instead of asking affiliates to updating their links.
Personally I'd go with option #1. You can combine that with the robots.txt block of your /ads/ directory too.
-
If you read the article I mentioned above, it really does not hide anything from Google, but you are clearly saying that these links are of no value.
I would use the 301 redirect.
In your case, yes that would save a step to just put /ads/ into robots.
-
Google will follow a 301 and will transfer almost all the link equity/or lack of it. Common practice is to 301 redirect through a page that is in robots.txt. This prevents Google from following while moving the user along.
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
-
Is This good practice.
We are a UK company but we would like to get listed on some USA business directories. If say we enter our company name, the first and second line of our UK business address but put a USA state and a zip code would this help us for SEO or is this classed as black hat trying to deceive Google. Thank you in advance for any help.
Link Building | | Palmbourne0 -
Best Name for Business and Backlinks / SEO
Sorry if this is a basic question I should know the answer for. We have just acquired the .org for a moderately well searched keyword set. Our objective is to fight for rank specifically on this one set of two keywords. We want make sure our site is setup and business named optimally for this. Here is my question. What is the best business name for SEO and keyword rich backlinks, or anything else I'm not thinking of? KEYWORDS: Blue Widget DOMAIN: BlueWidget.org BUSINESS NAME OPTIONS: A) simply BlueWidget.org. We like this but do we lose some benefit of "Blue Widget" with a space on backlinks? **B) Blue Widget Foundation. Is this better because people will reference us by the keywords with a space "The Blue Widget Foundation", instead of "from the people at BLUEWIDGET.org"? ** Am I missing anything important here in the name? We just want to start everything off on the right foot. Thank you Moz. Just joined and my first post.
Link Building | | RetBit0 -
Getting a sitewide links from one domain as oppsed to few links from certain pages, a good, bad or horrible idea?
Hello, I have a website that is performing really well in Google for country specific Real Estate Website. I have had this site for just about 2 years and I have 4600+ indexed pages, and about 50 of my main keywords appear in top 10 results on Google. I have now started a second site with a brand new domain, its only about 2 months old. This one is a Travel website and again its country specific (same country that real estate website is performing well in) and since its still building up the content and has barely a couple of backlinks, I am thinking of adding a linkback to it from my Real Estate Site. Is it a good idea to add a site wide link back from header section of the real estate website to my travel website? Both sites has same country and most of the keywords in both relate to this country. Or will I be better off adding a few text links from few pages with best Page Authority? Or - do you suggest that I do not link the two at all? Both sites are hosted on different servers, with different IP's and one is on windows server created in asp.net while another is a magento site. Any advidce / insight will be much appreciated and thank you in advance.
Link Building | | waituk_sanjeev0 -
SEO Consulting Agency for Strategy and Link Removal
We need your guidance on SEO Agency we can consult for strategy planning for our websites. We received manual Partial penalty on both domain few months back and since then have seen tremendous fall in rankings for both of the domains. Have been trying to remove all spam links we found out of links we got from webmasters and disavow one's we were not able to get removed. But yet request for penalty removal not accepted. Would appreciate your concern on helping us out if we can take help of some agency for aggressively getting our spam links removed and plan for a better strategy to improve our rankings. Please suggest one of the best in this domain we could reach.
Link Building | | amitjain0 -
Does the ratio of external nofollow links to external "do follow" links matter in terms of SERPs ranking?
My site has an external link nofollow:dofollow ratio of approximately 1:1 That is, there are about as many nofollow external links as "do follow" external links. I have an impression that the ratio of no-follow to "do follow" links is a factor in the way that our website shows up in SERPs. I have the impression from reading a variety of sources, and from looking at Seomoz, that calculate "trust" factors as if they mattered (in SERPs), that seem to value a relatively low nofollow:dofollow ratio. Am I correct about that? Thanks,
Link Building | | tcolling
Tim PS - I don't know whether or not this matters, but our website is at: www.trustworthycare.com - Tim0 -
Best way of starting link building to a new website?
I am doing SEO for a security keyholding company and would like to build up some quality links from related and high PR sites. Submitting profiles to directories is incredibly time consuming. I am thinking of outsourcing a link building campaign to a link building company, but know Google advises against this. Does anyone recommend a cost effective and ethical link building service out there? Or are there any link building techniques to use that will help me out? What I want to be sure of is that a link building campaign won’t get my websites penalised in search engines and the links are from quality and related websites. Many thanks in advance
Link Building | | AlexBarnes0 -
Back Link: Is LinkedIn keywords in profile good Link building strategy?
I distribute industrial products B2B with e commerce. I have a personal profile on LinkedIn. I listed the products I sell and I could have all my partners and associates list my web site on their profiles. Do search engines review LinkedIn personal profiles or company profiles and is it a good marketing strategy to have my web site, keywords, and my two largest selling products on LinkedIn?
Link Building | | Wales0 -
What has been the best Link Bait you have seen for Low budgets?
What has been the best Link Bait you have seen for Low budgets? All Ideas welcome!
Link Building | | DavidKonigsberg0