Incoming affiliate links: is it better to follow or nofollow?
-
Hello here,
this question is from a merchant stand point, and here is a typical scenario: this merchant has thousand of affiliate incoming links. Affiliates link to specific product pages with their affiliate ID passed as a parameter as:
http://www.merchantsite.com/products/product_page/?affid=[affiliate_id]
and users get 301 redirected to a clean URL like:
http://www.merchantsite.com/products/product_page/
after that a cookie is stored into the user's browser for tracking purposes.
Now, my question is the following: is for the merchant more convenient to have its affiliates linking with follow or nofollow links? Is that actually relevant? What are the pros and cons?
Thank you in advance for any insights!
-
Thank you Everett, that makes sense and I will do that indeed!
Thank you again very much for all your help guys.
Best,
Fabrizio
-
Hello Fabrizo,
That I know of, having too many nofollow links will not harm your site - other than there being fewer followable links, and thus less pagerank.
These links have commercial intent. Someone is getting compensated for linking to you, which means they should be nofollowed if you wish to stay within Google's Webmaster Guidelines. Nobody can make the risk Vs reward decision for you, but it does seem that penalties are getting more and more difficult to come out of. It could ruin a business if the website was penalized or filtered for months - even years - as a result of an algorithm update designed to crack down on followable affiliate links.
With that being said, you could always approach your highest trusted affiliates (good website, great content, links mixed into the content in a natural way) and offer them a higher commission rate for being such good affiliates. Of course, that would be a good reason to provide them with new link code, at which point you could take Naku's excellent advice on running them (via 301) through another site that allows you to sever the redirect at any time in case you need to clean up your link profile. You would of course need to notify the affiliates if you ever decide to do that since they worked hard to produce the content and add the links, only to have them 404 some day.
-
Thank you Nakul, I agree with you and I will do that way! I have my last concern here: may having an high number of incoming nofollow links be a problem? I mean, if I have much more incoming "nofollow" links vs "follow" compared with my competitors, may be that an issue? From the SEOmoz Competitive Link Analysis tool I already see my incoming link profile having much more nofollow links than my competitors... I am still figuring out if that's actually a problem or not!
This last question will close my research here.
Thank you again very much.
-
You are 100% right. That's it. The concern is having 100's of thousands of links that would be very very low quality links. The affiliate link pattern will make it "sort of okay" if you decide to keep them follow. Those links are there for the affiliate tracking, but typically the majority of the web uses some sort of an affiliate tracking site like GAN (Which is closing down), CJ, Linkshare etc. Considering that, is it really worth the risk of having that many number of links ? Maybe, maybe not. And that's the business decision you need to make.
The affiliate traffic and sales is important (which justifies the affiliate program). Your natural SEO rankings (current and future rankability) helps you justify the importance of these kinds of decisions and which is why you are asking this question.
We just need to find the right balance without tripping too much on either side.
-
Thank you Nakul. May I ask you what are the reasons to use a nofollow? Is that just to avoid any possible penalization? And here is my natural question: by doing that, will I lose any possible link juice coming currently from my affiliates? Or do you think that I am not getting that anyway?
Thank you again!
-
I'd suggest using a rel="nofollow" in the link to you.
-
Thank you for your reply.
The website I am talking about is my main website virtualsheetmusic.com
I have several hundreds of affiliates that have integrated our data feed on their own website, and so we may have thousands of incoming links from each affiliate. We have our in-house affiliate program and despite we can apply a URL shortener as you are suggesting, that would take a long time to have all the affiliates update their own websites. But that's a great idea we could start deploying soon! Would you suggest to use a 301 redirect there too?
Despite that, what about my original follow-nofollow question? In my current situation, what can I tell my affiliates to do: follow or nofollow?
Thanks!
-
Fabrizo
How big is your natural link profile ? How many affiliate links are we talking ? Do you get a lot of natural links ? Is this your own affiliate program ? Can you do some sort of a link shortener of your own ? EG:
http://www.MSLink.com/whatever/?affid=[affiliate_id]
that redirects to
http://www.merchantsite.com/products/product_page/?affid=[affiliate_id]
which then further redirects to your product page.
This way if there are future problems, you can change/remove the redirects from MSLink.com if they happen to be hurting you anytime in the future while maintaining full control.
I hope this helps.
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
-
100 Links Warning
Our website is GarageFlooringLLC.com. We rank relatively well for our main keywords but I am always looking to rank better. The 100 links question has been discussed to no end but I believe our website provides a great example of why a small business might have more than 100 links and IF we need to drop below that. User Experience vs Rules I think it is fair to say that if customers cannot find what they are looking for, it does not matter how well you rank. Our menu is designed to get people to the page they want to be on in a single click. So What Now? Do we remove items from the menu and only link to categories adding an extra click or two to the customers UI or do we leave well enough alone
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GFLLCCO0 -
To No Follow, or to Not No Follow?
So one of the big issues facing my website is that Moz seems to be picking up all of the ''Search'' and ''Tag'' pages, which is causing duplicate content. I cannot see any use for Google to index these pages, so is it better to create a No-Follow rule specific to Search and Tag?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | moon-boots0 -
Lower quality new domain link vs higher quality repeat domain link
First time poster here with a dilemma that head scratching and spreadsheets can't solve! I'm trying to work out whether to focus on getting links from new domains or to nurture relationships with the bigger sites in our business and get more links. Of the two links below which does the community here think would be more valuable a signal to Google? Both would be links from within relevant text/post copy. Link 1. Site DA 30. No links currently from this domain. Link 2. Site DA 60. Many links over last 12 months already from this domain. I suspect link 1 but given the enormous disparity in ranking power am I correct?! Thanks for any considered opinions out there! Matthew
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mat20150 -
Unpaid Followed Links & Canonical Links from Syndicated Content
I have a user of our syndicated content linking to our detailed source content. The content is being used across a set of related sites and driving good quality traffic. The issue is how they link and what it looks like. We have tens of thousands of new links showing up from more than a dozen domains, hundreds of sub-domains, but all coming from the same IP. The growth rate is exponential. The implementation was supposed to have canonical tags so Google could properly interpret the owner and not have duplicate syndicated content potentially outranking the source. The canonical are links are missing and the links to us are followed. While the links are not paid for, it looks bad to me. I have asked the vendor to no-follow the links and implement the agreed upon canonical tag. We have no warnings from Google, but I want to head that off and do the right thing. Is this the right approach? What would do and what would you you do while waiting on the site owner to make the fixes to reduce the possibility of penguin/google concerns? Blair
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BlairKuhnen0 -
How to find affiliate sites linking to a competitor website?
Hello here, I am trying to understand the best way to find sites that are affiliate of a competitor, through link research. Typically our competitor's affiliates link to our competitor website via any of the following links: http://www.musicnotes.com/sheetmusic/ard.asp?SID=[aff_id]&LID=[link_id] http://click.linksynergy.com/link?id=[aff+id]&offerid=[off_id]&type=2&murl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.musicnotes.com%2Fsheetmusic%2Fmtd.asp%3Fppn%3D[item_id] The first link looks much easier to find, so I have tried to find the first kind of links with Google by using the "link:" clause as follows: link:http://www.musicnotes.com/sheetmusic/ard.asp Or, similarly, by using Open Site Explorer. But I always get 0 results! It is weird because I know there are thousands of affiliates out there with the same tracking code. How's that possible? Why does it look impossible to find the sites I am looking for? Would you suggest any different approach? Any ideas, suggestions and thoughts are very welcome! Thank you in advance. Fab.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau0 -
Does the number of links on a page metric include repeated links?
Just wondering if the number of links on the page metric includes links that are repeated? So, if I had 100 links to one page would this count as 100 or 1 link?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Cornwall
If it's the former does this mean more links to one page adds weight? Thanks0 -
Can Affiliate Links Harm Your Rank?
Does Google interpret Affiliate links as paid links? If so, can Affiliate links harm your rank if they are not properly tagged with a no-follow? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AWCthreads0 -
Blog links - follow or nofollow?
I need my memory refreshed here! Say, I've got a blog and some of the posts have links to recommended external sites and content. Should these be nofollowed? They're not paid links or anything like that, simply things relevant to the post.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeterAlexLeigh0