Redirect to Affiliate script via htacces - Is that risky?
-
Hi,
We are offering an affiliate programme to publishers. The problem is that the links to the Affiliate Script are very user-UNfriendly (something like http://scripts.affiliateprogramme....../..../....)
I would like to give them a simple url:
www.website.com/PublishersPage
And then redirect this via HTACCESS to the script link (which would then send them back to us).
Would that be a problem for SEO? for Google?
Thank you for your help.
-
If I understand this correctly, you are the merchant, and you have some affiliate software. Your affiliates will come to your software and get these links to use, which are not clean? You then want the affiliates to have a clean URL to use to link to you?
That's actually done very commonly by many experienced affiliates already. In terms of SEO, most affiliates that I know set their affiliate links to go through a sub directory link like /go or /jump. That directory typically gets blocked in the robots.txt file, so that those links will be completely ignored by spiders - so as a merchant, you'll still get the clicks, but won't get any SEO benefit from doing that.
It really is better if you can just use an affiliate program that gives your affiliates clean links in the first place. The cleaner your links are, the less likely that affiliates will think to cloak the links on their own websites, and use some techniques that reduce any SEO value of those links for you. For your affiliates, the simpler / easier you make it for them - the better results you're going to see from your program.
-
I don't see this being a problem directly. You will have some advantage in the way of citations and links to
www.website.com/PublishersPage from the affiliate websites, but then these links will then redirect to the script via .htaccess and then back to your website.
How many affiliates are we talking ? If you think from the affiliate perspective, they'd like it as well I am guessing because if I am the affiliate, I would love to link to www.website.com/PublishersPage vs http://scripts.affiliateprogramme....../..../....)
Do yes, definitely consider doing it. Your affiliates are going to love it. I don't see a lot of merchants doing this. This is definitely something unique.
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
-
Looking for a way to crawl and test validity of affiliate links at scale. Ideas?
Hey all, I'm on the hunt for a service that will crawl our affiliate links and let us know when they return an error. I need to know that the last URL in the chain is returning a 200 over thousands of pages and links on a continual basis. The hitch is that most crawlers like Screaming Frog will return all of our links as working because it's only testing the first step, and this really requires a cloud solution anyway. Anyone happen to know of something? Edit for clarity's sake: I need something to check entire redirect chains in bulk that isn't a Wordpress plugin, isn't a website where you plug in a URL and it cuts you off after the first 100 results, and has the ability to crawl the site and provide reporting on a continual basis. Bi75jku
Affiliate Marketing | | BradsDeals0 -
UK Affiliate programmes as an advertiser
Hi, I'm looking into setting up an affiliate programme (as an advertiser). The company offers commercial mortgages for a UK market only. I was wondering if you had any experience with any UK affiliate platforms and had any recommendations? I want to test the water with a platform first as we don't really know whether it will work for us or not. We're looking at it for lead generation. Potentially offering payment on a completed mortgage or a lower payment per lead. I think it may be worthwhile offering both options. I'll have to work out the model, but we can make it work nicely for the publisher, I think. Thanks, Amelia
Affiliate Marketing | | CommT0 -
Affiliates website, I need webpages linsk to study the topic
Kindly Provide me the best links where I can study about Affiliates websites, How to create them? there SEO? Content etc.
Affiliate Marketing | | bondhoward0 -
How to flag inbound affiliate links to Search Engines
Afternoon Mozzers, I was chatting to our VP of marketing earlier about one of our sites with a somewhat unhealthy looking link profile. This is primarily caused by the sector its in and the fact that lots of low quality lead generators / affiliates operate there, sending traffic to us in return for payment on accepted leads. Now, he recalled that there is a way to mark these inbound links, through a URL parameter he thought, as being affiliates and therefore should be ignored as we don’t want them misinterpreted as an attempt to manipulate our rankings. I have been doing a spot of research but can't find a straight answer. heres a few articles i looked at: blogaid, Yoast, Webmaster world and the Moz Q&A.The problem is all these are from the perspective of a site linking out and acting as an affiliate, so all deal with that page not losing PR. The two methods i have derived from this boil down to: No follow the links Use an intermediary redirect page and script which you can block from robots.txt So, back to our case - Are there any ways we can signal to Search engines, as the destination site, that these links are from affiliates (such as this URL parameter our VP had vague recollections off) or should i just get in touch and ask the sites to make them Nofollow? Thanks, Tom.
Affiliate Marketing | | Sarbs0 -
Does having affiliates hurt seo?
one of my clients has a TON of affiliates out there building links back to his site all with the ?ref=AFFILIATENAME tracking string does google understand this and not count these links or is there a way to nofollow all links with this tracking string? just wondering how big companies rank well and still have thousands of affiliates building links on all kinds of properties using all kinds of methods thanks
Affiliate Marketing | | Ezpro90 -
Will giving a blogger an affiliate url to my site reduce her links' seo value to me?
If a blogger were to write a post about one of my products and link to my product page, would giving her an affiliate url to link to rather than the normal link spoil the seo value of the link? So instead of mysite.com/product-one it would be mysite.com/affiliate/blogger/product-one Google would think... this is a transaction not a vote of confidence?
Affiliate Marketing | | Brocberry0 -
I need some feedback on the value of affiliate aggregators like Link Share
My company decided to start a Link Share affiliate program at the beginning of this year. I've had serious reservations about the value of the program since the beginning but was overruled. Here are my concerns: The majority of publishers seem to be coupon scraper sites or borderline link farms I am told the biggest revenue earners in our network are publishing articles about my company with links back to our site but if they are Google Alerts sure isn't finding them and a manual search hasn't turned up anything either. This makes me think these publishers are using some sort of unsavory way to drive traffic to our site or maybe even cookie traffic that was coming to our site anyway in order to get credit for the sale. Most of all I'd like to hear from anyone else who has used Link Share in the past. Secondly I realize there's not a lot of information here but I'm wondering if this passes the smell test for anyone else. Any feedback would be appreciated.
Affiliate Marketing | | eTundra0 -
Affiliate for SEO
Hello, If you get bad websites as affiliates through share a sale can that hurt your seo? Thanks Tyler
Affiliate Marketing | | tylerfraser0