Coupon websites as affiliates

[unikey]

We recently started using shareasale.com for affiliate marketing and have received literally hundreds of applications from coupon websites wanting to become affiliates. Most we have not approved as the quality of the sites is poor. However, a few sites seem more legitimate. Could having these types of sites harm our seo in any way?

[alecfwilson]

No problem! Affiliate marketing is a space that could really use something that shakes the current landscape up. I'd say nearly all affiliate marketers are great, and very helpful (and affiliates are too valuable a lead source to ignore either way), but some elements of the way the space works attracts less-than-aboveboard players. I've seen great value from affiliates, even when we were constantly fighting the coupon skimmers. One last thing that may or not be applicable - not all companies that use affiliates even offer a coupon, but affiliates will still advertise {{company}} coupons. My current company does this. This makes it a bit easier to keep an eye on the skimmers, since I just added a line to our policy stating that affiliates may not advertise coupons, whereas the only thing you can really do about skimmers when you do have a coupon is make sure they aren't bidding on branded search terms or using your trademark in their root or subdomain name.

[unikey]

Wow, thanks for the very well thought out answer. I really appreciate it. You have given me some things to think about and look into a little further.

Thanks Again!

[alecfwilson]

Hi unikey,

I'm not 100% sure on negative SEO impact (would be interested to hear if the assumptions I've made from experience are accurate), but I previously worked for a company that did ~10% of their $75mm annual revenue from affiliates, and we primarily used ShareASale. We never saw a negative SEO impact from the affiliates (and we approved nearly all of them, at least initially), which I am assuming is because ShareASale affiliate links are all nofollow. Since ShareASale's value prop is massively expanding your reach to potential customers through their network, they should have been incentivized to make sure there is no SEO downside to leveraging their platform.

However, while this isn't negative SEO-related, I do have a decent amount of experience with affiliates, so you may be interested. You should be somewhat wary of affiliates, especially when the link you provide has a coupon attached. Some (not all, and definitely not the good ones) will just spin up tons of sites like cheap{{company}}coupons.com to try and capture some of the search traffic that is generated by people seeing a coupon code box on your checkout page. Since the way the affiliate model works is by giving a revshare to the affiliate for acquiring the customer, tracked by a browser cookie, they should only be receiving their cut if they sent the customer to you as the original referrer or sent someone to you who was not already planning on purchasing. Someone searching for {{company}} coupons isn't someone the affiliate sent you. The basic ShareASale policy forbids this, but you need to periodically run some searches for your brand + coupons and make sure no one is violating the policy. Luckily, this only really becomes an issue if you are seeing substantial success with affiliates, but I try and check in on this once a month or so.

For a better summary of the problem and a counterpoint (Don't worry too much about whether affiliate marketing is or isn't a scam, what matters if it works for you. These are just more eloquent summaries of the potential upsides and downsides of affiliates), see:

http://venturebeat.com/2013/08/12/the-big-ugly-affiliate-marketing-scam/

http://venturebeat.com/2013/08/15/affiliate-marketing-not-bad/