SEO value of affiliate external links
-
There are websites that have linked to my site. Whenever I hover over link I see my direct website URL and I am not seeing "no follow" when viewing source code so I assume these are passing link juice. However when I click on link it directs briefly to shareasale (affiliate account) in web address bar, but then quickly directs back to my website URL as directed. I was curious if these good links I am acquiring truly pass juice or since they briefly pass through an affiliate site if that cancels or dilutes the link juice. Also I am noticing when inspecting element that after the HREF it says class="external-link"
I am just not sure if my link building efforts are being ruined by having an affiliate account running.I did not tell them I had one. I guess they are searching to see that I have one and trying to make a few extra commission dollars.
-
I see a ton of churn with small, boutique merchants, and even the large ones have been grumbling lately about not wanting to support certain types of websites. I think it really depends on how effectively you're able to leverage your publishers, but as with everything you get a lot of merchants who join up with no idea how to do that.
-
This is how I see it work in practice when a merchant closes their ShareASale program:
our nice clean cloaked link --303--> shareasale affiliate link --302--> Destination URL (status code 200)
Assuming that the links you're seeing aren't cloaked, even if the user who clicks on an old ShareASale affiliate link does in fact land on your site, they're still getting pushed to the destination page through a 302. So there's not going to be much SEO value in these links, if there's any at all.
In our case, when a SAS program dies, the destination page is the front page of our site, not the merchant's site. This may be an account setting somewhere within our publisher account or something customizable, but it's not something the merchant gets to control.
-
Hi Nicholas,
To lead on from what others have said, I'd agree that these links are unlikely to be passing value from a ranking perspective i.e. they're not likely to pass PageRank. Google do try and detect affiliate links and as Matt has said, they see these as placed to get affiliate revenue as opposed to being placed because someone genuinely endorses the website in question.
In terms of how this actually works, I'm not too familiar with Sharesale personally. But I know that similar affiliate programs provide plugins / scripts to affiliates which can make the link look natural, but when clicked, some JavaScript kicks in and adds the affiliate URL and the redirect. The website owner themselves can also do this themselves if they want to "mask" the affiliate link so that when someone hovers over the link, they see a nice clean URL rather than a potentially long and messy affiliate link.
In terms of what you can do - it really comes down to whether you value the traffic from the affiliate and if that drives revenue. If it does, then that's more valuable (I'd guess) than having a normal link. Plus, would they actually link to you at all if they couldn't get affiliate revenue? If not, then stepping out of the affiliate program may cause more harm than good. But it's really a balance between the affiliate revenue and potential link benefit.
I hope that helps a bit!
Paddy
-
I didn't see anything about these links showing up in GSC. If that's the case, please let us know. I have seen links show up there before that first 302 redirect to another site. In theory, these shouldn't pass pagerank, but historically Google has had some trouble figuring out 302s.
Nicholas, I agree with Matt Antonio as well. If the link the href tag goes to a ShareaSale URL it should not pass pagerank.
However, it looks like instead of just going through a 302 redirect, affiliate links like the one below just go to a 200 (OK) status page, which uses javascript (window.location.replace) to send the user on to the merchant's site. It doesn't surprise me that this could become an issue now that Google is so good at crawling javascript. But they are still pretty terrible about figuring out what it "means" in terms of what should show in the search results.
Are merchants still getting good ROI from programs on massive affiliate networks? It's been awhile since I've seen that work in a brand's favor over the long term.
-
The links ARE setup like this Link to your product
I am confused on how it knows to briefly direct to Shareasale. In this source code there is nothing that looks out of place. It looks like a completely normal link except it does contain the verbiage class="external-link" other than that it looks regular. These links are ALSO showing up in webmaster tools as DO FOLLOW.
-
A link can't be direct to your site, then refer back to shareasale, then redirect back to your site unless you've set it up that way somehow.
So if someone builds a shareasale link like:
This is going to shareasale. If you quit shareasale and they said it would still go directly to you, they're just not planting their tracking cookie on the intermediate step. Everything else would remain the same.
If the link is something like:
Link to product and somehow that goes from your site, to shareasale, back to your site - well that's definitely not helping you very much for SEO and if you quit, yes that would then go directly to your site - but only if you reconfigured how the links were working since this type of linking would require a lot of special work to make it happen. It's more likely it's the 1st example.
In any case, they both pass through Shareasale and, per Matt Cutts, Google is attempting to not give you credit for that link. Whether or not they do, I can't say - but they're attempting not to. I'm not sure which part of my previous answer may not be "completely true."
-
I am not sure if this is completely true, however I contacted Shareasale about these links. I asked them if I were to close my Shareasale account, they said the link would then just directly go to me. The anchor link is indeed directly pointing to my site. I am not sure how google can read that it is affiliate looking at source code alone?
-
Matt is correct, link as redirect from affiliate site doesn't pass link juice, but it does count as a link with several other search engines, such as Bing usually do pass. Also I am strong believer in Matt Cutts theory, but he hasn't been part of Google for quite some times, Google is rolling out unnamed algorithms, meaning everything is possible specially if you are finding those links in webmaster search console.
-
These type of links are generally demoted/do not pass juice in the first place.
Matt Cutts said in the past in an interview with Eric Enge:
Matt Cutts: Typically, we want to handle those sorts of links appropriately. A lot of the time, that means that the link is essentially driving people for money, so we usually would not count those as an endorsement.
To me, Shareasale is a huge provider of affiliate links so I would assume Google is well onto those links and doesn't count them. You aren't going to get a ranking benefit from these links, IMO.
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
-
Weird Site is linking to our site and links appears to be broken
I have got a lot of weird links indexed from this page: http://kzs.uere.info/files/images/dining-table-and-2-upholstered-chairs.html When clicking the link it shows 404. Also, the spam score is huge. What do you guys suggest to do with this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Miniorek
Could it be done by somebody to get our rankings down or domain penalized? Best Regards
Mike & Alex0 -
Transferring link juice from a canonical URL to an SEO landing page.
I have URLs that I use for SEM ads in Google. The content on those pages is duplicate (affiliate). Those pages also have dynamic parameters which caused lots of duplicate content pages to be indexed. I have put a canonical tag on the Parameter pages to consolidate everything to the canonical URL. Both the canonical URL and the Parameter URLs have links pointing to them. So as it stands now, my canonical URL is still indexed, but the parameter URLs are not. The canonical page is still made up of affiliate (duplicate) content though. I want to create an equivalent SEO landing page with unique content. But I'd like to do two things 1) remove the canonical URL from the index - due to duplicate affiliate content, and 2) transfer the link juice from the canonical URL over to the SEO URL. I'm thinking of adding a meta NoIndex, follow tag to the canonical tag - and internally linking to the new SEO landing page. Does this strategy work? I don't want to lose the link juice on the canonical URL by adding a meta noindex tag to it. Thanks in advance for your advice. Rob
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | partnerf0 -
Advice on forum links
Hi guys, Looking for some good advice on forum links and there potential negative impact. I am analysing the links of a URL and around 60% of the links are coming from a forum (on a different domain). The forum is very relevant - about the same product he is selling and also has a decent user base. This 60% of links account for roughly 6,500 links. All with different varying keyword anchor text's, and some with excessive usage of a particular keyword anchor text. They are also all do-follow. They are in a mixture of signature links and in post links. The site they link to has been hit by penguin which also has an EMD. MY question is even though these links are relevant and on a good site with good traffic, do you think they have likely been picked up in the penguin algorithm? My initial thought was yes only because they are all do follow and mostly keyword based. But id love to hear thoughts on this as well as possible recovery options, i.e should he remove the forum links, reduce drastically or make them all no follow so traffic can still pass through? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ROIcomau0 -
How to be a good SEO optimizer while competing with a good ranked Bad SEO optimizer?
My keywords are very competitive. My on page optimization report gives A grade for all the keywords I want to target to my Root domain. But my root domain does not show up on search engines for those same keywords. So thanks to SEOmoz i have managed to understand the place I lack is good link building. My competitors have done lot of link building through spamming, commenting on blogs, directories etc. Now according to good seo, this is not right. What do i do? I get digging more in it, i realized that i am getting traffic mostly for less globally searched keywords. But my competitors get high traffic from well searched keywords. How do i cope with such competition? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MiddleEastSeo0 -
Rel="external" What affect if any does this have on SEO
When building Anchor text links what affect if any does rel="external" have on inlinks placed to your site. Thanks, Kjay
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEOKeith0 -
If google ignores links from "spammy" link directories ...
Then why does SEO moz have this list: http://www.seomoz.org/dp/seo-directory ?? Included in that list are some pretty spammy looking sites such as: <colgroup><col width="345"></colgroup>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | adriandg
| http://www.site-sift.com/ |
| http://www.2yi.net/ |
| http://www.sevenseek.com/ |
| http://greenstalk.com/ |
| http://anthonyparsons.com/ |
| http://www.rakcha.com/ |
| http://www.goguides.org/ |
| http://gosearchbusiness.com/ |
| http://funender.com/free_link_directory/ |
| http://www.joeant.com/ |
| http://www.browse8.com/ |
| http://linkopedia.com/ |
| http://kwika.org/ |
| http://tygo.com/ |
| http://netzoning.com/ |
| http://goongee.com/ |
| http://bigall.com/ |
| http://www.incrawler.com/ |
| http://rubberstamped.org/ |
| http://lookforth.com/ |
| http://worldsiteindex.com/ |
| http://linksgiving.com/ |
| http://azoos.com/ |
| http://www.uncoverthenet.com/ |
| http://ewilla.com/ |0 -
Advertising links hurt SEO?
I'm working with a publisher who said that having DFA links on his site will hurt his SEO. He is taking my link and pointing it back to his site and then to mine. Does that sound right to you?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GFTMarketer0 -
Quantifying Linking Campaign Value
Is there any way to predict if and how Organic traffic would change if we sucesfully added some high-quality links to our website? Quantifying link value would help to plan how much time/efforts we should spend on quality link-building. I understand that the more good links we get - the better. But beyond that, I am looking for some methodology/data/formulas that would help to decide if links are worth pursing. Here is an example: Let's say we acquired 20 high-quality links from PR 0-5 pages of some trusted web sites of PR6-8. Let's say that on these pages would also link to 10-20 other web sites. Would such campaign be of some direct value to our ecommerce website of PR6? My question is limited to how high-quality links improve overall Google search traffic to the website only. I am not interested in calculating value of individual keywords - most of our search traffic comes from long tail. I am also not interested in how to estimate referral traffic - both seem much easier topics to tackle. But how would I be able to measure the value of lets say 1 link from PR 8 site with a PR3 page, when there are 10 other external links on that page?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Quidsi0