Affiliate Links Dilemma
-
Hello everyone.
Our e-commerce website virtualsheetmusic.com has several hundreds affiliate incoming links, and many of them are "follow" links. I thought to redirect all incoming affiliate links to a "intermediate" page excluded by the robots.txt file in order to avoid any possible "commercial links" penalty from Google, but I now face a dilemma... most of our best referral links are affiliate links, by excluding those links from our back link profile could give us a big hit in terms of rankings.
How would you solve this dilemma? What would you suggest doing in this sort of cases?
-
Thank you Everett, I think what you wrote makes sense and I'll see what to do. I'll analyze again all my affiliate links and assess the risk of getting rid of those links. If I see I could risk losing rankings in some way, I'll consider to disable the stronger affiliates last.
Thank you again.
-
I can't make the decision for you, but am glad that you understand the situation enough to see your dilemma.
Google is pretty clear about their policy on followable affiliate links. Could you be ranking even better by getting rid of PR-passing affiliate links? Or would that ultimately harm your rankings? It depends on if those links are being seen as paid at the moment, and whether there is any type of penalty applied to the site. You'd probably know via GSC if there was a manual action / penalty but there could be an algorithmic one. If that's the case, you may improve rankings by removing them.
The fact that your affiliate program is in-house means you may be able to fly under algorithmic radars, so to speak, and that those links could be seen as legitimate. But they're not. Remember that and I think you'll be fine.
-
Thank you Everett, that's actually my "dilemma"... I understand the risks of both actions:
1. If I leave things how they are now, I could still benefit of any little juice coming from those links, but I could risk a penalization from Google because of that.
2. If I apply what you are suggesting, I will be safe from any possible penalization from Google, but I could lose any possible juice coming from those affiliate links.
Since from my back link profile it looks like most of our best referrals are affiliate links, I am very afraid to lose a lot of juice and consequently rankings if I disable those as you are suggesting. Data in my hands shows me a strong possibility on that (we have affiliates with a strong SEO profile), whereas I have almost nothing showing that those links are really penalizing me, that's why I have such an hard time to decide what to do.
Another option could be to keep the way it is just for those "strong" affiliate links, whereas disable all other ones...
How would you suggest acting in this kind of scenario?
-
If you have other websites linking to you because of an affiliate program the safest thing to do is make those links (from them to your affiliate program URL) go through an intermediate DOMAIN. You don't care if Google thinks that domain is odd because everyone page is blocked via Robots.txt Disallow: /. You don't even care if the affiliate sites are a little on the spammy end because they're linking to a totally different domain. And instead of submitting disavow files or requesting links be taken down, you can always just let that domain die off to kill ALL affiliate links to the site in one fell swoop if there is ever an issue. That's my recommendation. It's just safer that way.
If you want to retain the pagerank those links "may" be sending, you have to also accept the risk that comes with them.
-
Thank you Mike, I'll try to do that then.
We have also cleaned some suspect backlinks from some old-time-directories that could have had some weight for our latest loss. Even though we had links there for a long time (several years), we have considered the fact that Google could have updated his algorithm to account for those bad links in some way and discount most of our rankings.
To give you an idea of the loss I am talking about, have a look at our SEO visibility on searchmetrics.com:
http://suite.searchmetrics.com/en/research/?se=1&url=www.virtualsheetmusic.com
From the end of June we have begun to have a big drop in traffic, we have lost around 30% traffic from Google. That could be due to some algorithm change either content side (Panda) or link profile side (Penguin or similar?). We had some Panda related issues in the past, so that was the first possible cause came up to my mind, but since we had very big drops on some major keywords of ours for which we built suspect links in the past, I also thought about a possible Penguin related problem.
Thank you for your thoughts on this!
-
I like that idea. Keeps some of the upside (if there is any), but reduces the risk.
Do you have any other likely suspects besides the affiliate link thing?
The site seems like you could attract some editorial links. Like school music departments for .edus, right?
How bad a % search hit did you take in the last two months?
Best... Mike
-
Yeah, from my back-link profile, it looks like my top affiliates are among my best referring sites from the DA stand point, that's why I am worried to disavow and 302 redirect all of them.
Another solution could be to 302 redirect the smallest ones (most of them) and keep the way they are (301 redirect) the best ones (a few of them) without risking to lose any juice from those high DA affiliates.
What would you think about this kind of solution?
-
If you want to be on the safe side. The only downside would appear to be that if the problem is not affiliate links, you've nofollowed and 302'd the value out of them. Maybe take a look at how much of your link profile is affiiate, non-affiliate and followed/nofolllwed to try and get a handle on what that maneuver might cost you, in the event the affiliate links aren't the problem. I kind of think G has already discounted them, so maybe no big loss.
-
Ok, thanks, and yes, We have already asked to all of our affiliates to add the rel="nofollow" tag, but most of them don't even bother to open our emails, and that's why I was thinking to a fast solution from our side t tackle this issue.
So, back to my original question, you would suggest doing what I was thinking already: either 302 redirect or redirect to a "intermediate" page disallowed inside the robots.txt all affiliate link requests without worrying of losing any possible (not-likely) juice value from those top affiliates of ours. Is that correct?
-
Hi Fabrizo,
My suggestion is to contact all the affiliates, as you are, and get them to nofollow. Keep records of your efforts. I would consider 302ing, so you are not passing link value and therefor on the face of it not benefiting.
I wouldn't disavow them. I think the more likely scenario is that Google stopped counting them as editorial links... not a manual penalty (which you would probably have been notified of). G just figured it out and stopped giving you the boost from them.
Of course, there could be other problems unrelated to affiliate links. But with nofollows, 302s, and building new links.... how wrong could you be?
Best of Luck... Mike
-
Thanks Mike, sorry, I forgot to let you know that we have our own in-house affiliate program, so that affiliate links look like:
http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/page/?aff=affiliate_id
And then, all requests to that kind of URLs get 301 redirected to:
http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/page/
We haven't had any manual penalty so far, but we are afraid all those affiliate links could have some weight on the algorithmic side of Penguin or similar. We have experienced a pretty heavy drop in rankings in the last 2 months, and we are considering everything.
Back to my original question, I am trying to understand what's the best route to take: disavow those links or keep them the way they have been for the past 10-15 years?
Thank you again.
-
Hi Fabrizo,
Are these links obvious affiliate links, like CJ.com or similar?
I'm saying that in my experience of working with dozens of sites with affiliate links pointing to them, I don't think it's a very big penalty risk to virtualsheetmusic.com.
If you've experienced a drop in organic search traffic over time, short of having a penalty notice from Google in hand, it's more likely that those links have been de-valued as non-editorial and thus taken some wind out of your sails. This might feel like a penalty, but really it's more like they just don't help like they used to.
As such, spending some time building some editorial links would be more to the point than an intermediate page.
Best... Mike
-
Thank you Mike for your reply.
So, are you suggesting to redirect all affiliates links to my mentioned "intermediate" page, or not? How would you proceed to mitigate the risk from both sides (possible Google penalization and possible rankings degradation from those affiliate links)?
Thank you again very much!
-
Hi Fabrizio,
I don't think I would worry about it too much. Most of that risk, however little it is, is on the site linking to you. In Google's head, affiliate links are not editorially given links... more like (at worst/in concept) bought links, where the site gave the link in return for the affiliate income and therefor needs a nofollow.
Re: the risk for the linked-to site and as you know, affiliate links are not actually controllable by you. Also, Google has become decent at identifying affiliate networks and dismissing the value of them in the first place (assuming you're with some network), as mentioned here by Matt Cutts a while back: http://www.shoutmeloud.com/google-affiliate-links-seo.html
Finally, it looks like the site has enough other types of links that it's link profile is not crazily all affiliate links. Personally, I would put that energy into gaining some more editorially given links.
Best of luck, Fabrizio!
Mike
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
-
Site Migration Question - Do I Need to Preserve Links in Main Menu to Preserve Traffic or Can I Simply Link to on Each Page?
Hi There We are currently redesigning the following site https://tinyurl.com/y37ndjpn The local pages links in the main menu do provide organic search traffic. In order to preserve this traffic, would be wise to preserve these links in the main menu? Or could we have a secondary menu list (perhaps in the header or footer), featured on every page, which links to these pages? Many Thanks In Advance for Responses
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ruislip180 -
How would you link build to this page?
Hi Guys, I'm looking to build links to a commercial page similar to this: https://apolloblinds.com.au/venetian-blinds/ How would you even create quality links (not against Google TOS) to a commercial page like that? Any ideas would be very much appreciated. Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | spyaccounts140 -
Links: Links come from bizzare pages
Hi all, My question is related to links that I saw in Google Search Console. While looking at who is linking to my site, I saw that GSC has some links that are coming from third party websites but these third party webpages are not indexed and not even put up by their owners. It looks like the owner never created these pages, these pages are not indexed (when you do a site: search in Google) but the URL of these pages loads content in the browser. Example - www.samplesite1.com/fakefolder/fakeurl what exactly is this thing? To mention more details, the third party website in question is a Wordpress website and I guess is probably hijacked. But how does one even get these types pages/URLs up and running on someone else's website and then link out to other websites. I am concerned as the content that I am getting link from is adult content and I will have to do some link cleansing soon.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Malika10 -
Link Juice + Site Structure
Hi All, I have attached a simple website model.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mark_Ch
Page A is the home page attracting 1000 visitors per month.
One click away is Page B with 400 visitors per month, so on and so forth. You get an idea of the flow and clicks required to get to various pages. I have purposely placed Pages E-G to be 3 clicks away as they yield very little traffic. 1] Is this the best way to distribute link juice?
2] Should I point Pages C + D back to page A to influence its Page Rank (PA) Any other useful advice would be appreciated. Thanks Mark vafnchI0 -
Technical Question on Image Links - Part of Addressing High Number of Outbound Links
Hi - I've read through the forum, and have been reading online for hours, and can't quite find an answer to what I'm searching for. Hopefully someone can chime in with some information. 🙂 For some background - I am looking closely at four websites, trying to bring them up to speed with current guidelines, and recoup some lost traffic and revenue. One of the things we are zeroing in on is the high amount of outbound links in general, as well as inter-site linking, and a nearly total lack of rel=nofollow on any links. Our current CMS doesn't allow an editor to add them, and it will require programming changes to modify any past links, which means I'm trying to ask for the right things, once, in order to streamline the process. One thing that is nagging at me is that the way we link to our images could be getting misconstrued by a more sensitive Penguin algorithm. Our article images are all hosted on one separate domain. This was done for website performance reasons. My concern is that we don't just embed the image via , which would make this concern moot. We also have an href tag on each to a 'larger view' of the image that precedes the img src in the code, for example - We are still running the numbers, but as some articles have several images, and we currently have about 85,000 articles on those four sites... well, that's a lot of href links to another domain. I'm suggesting that one of the steps we take is to rel=nofollow the image hrefs. Our image traffic from Google search, or any image search for that matter, is negligible. On one site it represented just .008% of our visits in July. I'm getting a little pushback on that idea as having a separate image server is standard for many websites, so I thought I'd seek additional information and opinions. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MediaCF0 -
Link Building Question
Hey Moz'ers, I have created several blogs on different domains for the purpose of writing good content articles that contain 2-3 links per article that go back to my website. It has been up for about 3-4 weeks. I am not seeing my results/links showing up in OSE, is this because it still needs more time or is there something else I could be advised to look into? In theory these blogs will only contain 2-3 links from each domain to the site. I was also going to make sure the anchor text per link is different (keyword, brand name, random anchor like click here). Side note: How does this system sound as part of one small aspect to link building? red flags? Thanks for all the responses and advice.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MonsterWeb280 -
Counting over-optimised links - do internal links count too?
To whit: In working out whether I've too many over-optimised links pointing to my homepage, do I look at just external links -- or also the links from my internal pages to my homepage? In other words, can a natural link profile from internal pages help dilute overoptimisation from external links?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jeepster0 -
Google is not Indicating any Links to my site
We built a new store on another ccTLD and linked to it from some of our other domains in a few locations. I am noticing that with the Google operator command "links:" we are seeing nothing linking to our site anywhere. Some things to clarify: These are not no-follow links These pages linking to our new domain are indexed The pages being linked to on our new domain are indexed This is not a flash site or heavy in JavaScript The links existed the day the site was launched so when the new pages were crawled they existed. "Site:" command in Google shows me that my new site is indexed. What could potentially be causing this? I am trying to get these newer ccTLD's to begin ranking and I understand that I need to get links going to these pages since they are fairly new (2.5 months) so I can outrank the .com in the SE's in those locales. (Like Google.co.uk)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DRSearchEngOpt0