affiliate links help seo or have no affect?

[FutureM]

Hi

we are looking at working with some high quality sites to drive some traffic through to our website, I have never been this side of affiliate marketing I just had a few things i was wondering about.

Can the links be beneficial to SEO, assuming they link straight to the website and don't go through any other re-directs.

and related to that, is there a way to manage affiliate sales without using a third party like affiliate window? Problem i guess we have is our ecommerce system is bespoke so plug ins for wordpress, woocommerce or anything like that aren't solutions for us.

 

[DesignerNick]

You will need some work on your website for it to work to be able to track orders / clicks etc.

Most affiliates will nofollow the links but if they want them to be tracked they won't be just straight links to your domain as they will need tracking so may have variables on the end which your system will then pick up.

Also, make sure you have canonical linking setup on the pages.

 

[FutureM]

Might have a word with our developer then and see what they might be able to come up with.

 

[fisicx]

Google will know they are afiliate links so will just pass them by.

 

[FutureM]

Google will know they are afiliate links so will just pass them by.

even if we create a bespoke way of tracking, or is the fact that they will have some sort of tracking in them a hint to google? Is there a way of monitoring using analytics maybe?

 

[DesignerNick]

You can use analytics to track how people are clicking ?utm_source for example.

 

[fisicx]

even ...or is the fact that they will have some sort of tracking in them a hint to google?

Google won't need a hint. It will know where the link originated and be able to easily identifty that's it's an afiliate thing.

Nothing wrong with what you are doing but there won't be any ranking benefits.

 

[FutureM]

ah okay, the links wouldn't be from typical affiliate websites or blogs, it will be from football club websites, we have spoken to a few who are interested so going to try it out with them. Even without having seo benefit I think it could be good for us in sales.

 

[deetee25]

Dell UK have a great Affiliate programme .

 

[Aloha Telecom]

The general rule of thumb is, the higher ranking websites linking to your site, the better ranking it will give for your site as your associated with high quality, popular websites.

 

[StevePoster]

affiliate links help seo or have no affect?

Affiliate links has nothing to do with SEO.

 

[fisicx]

ah okay, the links wouldn't be from typical affiliate websites or blogs, it will be from football club websites, we have spoken to a few who are interested so going to try it out with them. Even without having seo benefit I think it could be good for us in sales.

That's different. They aren't afiliate links - they are just links. To have value that need to have some blurb and a reason to exist. If it's just a 'goal post supplied by xyx' then you might as well not bother. If the link is part of a report on the updates and changes to their equipment then it's gold.

 

[FutureM]

Oh, okay well I mean for them to work in the same way. I want to pay the clubs for each sale they get for us. I think it will be better for us and the club. Rather than just say "heres a place you can buy some football stuff" and pay for that, it will be more "support you club by purchasing with our partner". The clubs we have spoken to seem keen on this but im struggling to think of how to manage that sort of thing

 

[johnzakaria]

When it comes to affiliate links, it is recommended to keep your affiliate links no follow

 

[altonroot]

You can use Google's tagging service. Create fresh URL with tag and hand over to an affiliate. Affiliate links won't help in SEO. It should be no-followed. If you pay someone and get direct link from that website is violation of Google's guidelines and you are vulnerable to penalty. Penalty means complete wipe out from search engine result pages.

 

[OldWelshGuy]

Altonroot nailed it right there, Affiliate links should be Nofollowed, or not spiderable at the very least. if you use an affiliate system to build normal links, you are indeed guilty of buying links. There have been high profile cases of sites being wiped out for this practice.

 

[JoeInTheMiddle]

I don't agree with everyone telling you not to bother because they won't help you rank, affiliate links can sometimes be a good source of referral traffic. You do have to be careful how you build them though, don't do it all in one day, don't use optimised anchor text etc etc. It is normally best to try and make sure they're nofollow too.

 

[webgeek]

Yes, if you pass a url parameter like http://blahblah.com/?AFFILIATEID=12995, it won't take a rocket scientist to figure out you're getting page rank passed via affiliate links (dangerous). Since you're not looking to use a common affiliate network, Google will have a bit harder time connecting the dots. Your competition will be more than happy to help them pencil it in.

If, on the other hand you're using promo codes which are not embedded in the URL's, but rather are manually entered, then it becomes less obvious as to the nature of the relationship.

This doesn't make it somehow the best practices way of improving rankings via affiliate links, because you might just get a Google smackdown, but it just goes to show that the stock answer of 'all affiliate links are nofollow and do not help' is not necessarily always the case.

 

[altonroot]

I have written a blog post on how Google identify the paid links and penalize the websites. Their main weapon is link patterns. You can read full blog here

 

[JonnyMP]

Most links can be obtained online for the right price. So if you are trying to get your link on a blog, just ask. Though many reputable bloggers, won't even give you the time of day if you are using an affiliate link.

If you are willing to pay enough to have your affiliate link put on someone's blog, they are likely to oblige. And, it might even be do follow. (Though that's against Google TOS to allow a site advertiser/affiliate to have a do follow link). All this will depend on the individual blogger.

The key to getting these links past Google's censor is to cloak them by assigning a redirect from a page on your own domain or subfolder/subdomain. And, that page would redirect to the actual affiliate site. As for whether or not this will help SEO, most likely not, but at least it will take Google longer to realize you are linking to an affiliate site.

 

[webgeek]

The idea should not be how to 'get these links past Google's censor', but how to win while playing by the rules. Trying to get one over on Google is not how I would recommend someone gamble their children's college fund.