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?
-
Agreed. If your client has an account with Commission Junction, then they likely have a product or service with good volume. The DIY affiliate programs are good for new or smaller sites that don't have the volume for a service like Commission Junction.
Best,
Christopher -
The short answer is yes, it could have an SEO benefit but I would think carefully about the impact on the affiliate campaign.
The major advantage of being on a major affiliate network is the access to thousands of affiliates, some very large ones. If you took this is house you would need to put a lot of resources into recruiting new affiliates and even then you might not find the quality of affiliate you would get on a major network.
If you took it in house there is of course the tracking, admin and payment side of the affiliate setup to consider, implement and apply resource too as well.
If you (or your client) is serious about the affiliate campaign then I doubt you would improve it by taking it in house.
-
Yes, if they bring the affiliate program in house, some links may be counted. If you use a third-party affiliate app, some of them support SEO (perhaps for an additional cost). Also, keep in mind, the affiliates choice of banners ads vs text ads may affect link juice as well, assuming you decide to make text ads available.
Best,
Christopher -
Affiliate programs are designed to get traffic and sales, not improve search engine ranking. The affiliate generally redirects the link through their own domain with a meta refresh, pretty links or some other method to cloak and protect their affiliate information to ensure they get credit for the referral.
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
-
INBOUND LINKS FROM OTHER OWNED BRANDS HARMING MY MAIN SITE?
Hey, I work for a company that owns 5 brands, all pretty large sites with 10,000s of pages. We have one primary site, that has inbound links from all the other owned sites (4) resulting in 950k backlinks pointing to the domain. For context, the primary domain has 781 referring domains (with 4 of them being the other owned sites). My question was, will this excess of linking be harming the primary domain? Will the ration of backlinks to referring domains be seen as a negative quality indicator? Charlie
Link Building | | charliehowes10 -
Links to www version of my site, but we are on http - is this a problem?
My website is hosted on e.g. http://eg1 but i have lots of links and new links pointing to http://www.eg1
Link Building | | fattestcat
Is this something to worry about?
Should i contact the sites and ask them to change the links to http?
Or is it nothing to worry about? Thanks for your advice.0 -
A website with a spam score of 5 is back linking to me. How important is to get that link removed?
There is a website that OSE has identified with a spam score of 5, it back links to me with a very specific key word. How important is it to have them remove those links?
Link Building | | absoauto0 -
If i get link pointing to a specific page , will that link add up to the count of linking root domains too ?
If I create a fresh link pointing to specific page on my site, apart from adding a number to "page linking root domains" does it also add up to root domain linking ?
Link Building | | Techbate1 -
Creating your own blog for back linking to your site
Our competitor seems to be linked to a blog that they have created themselves. From an SEO perspective is it worthwhile creating a blog that is related to your particular industry and then only including links back to your site. Also is there any way to upload ,articles etc automatically to the blog to cut down on the people hours involved in updating content?
Link Building | | Hardley10 -
Site wide links
I have a few website that centralize spefic news (business news) from other sites and show the article source. The question is: The sites provide about 100.000 backlinks to 3 other sites. Do i remove the site wide links and keep them only on the front page or i keep them? Tjank you
Link Building | | petrescucld0 -
What's the typical response time to link building email requests?
Hello Forum, We're about to embark on a link building campaign and were curious about how long, on average, it takes to get a response to an email requesting links to our page. We're trying to come up with a timeline estimate for our campaign. Thanks
Link Building | | pano0