Issues with centrally hosting your own affiliate links?
-
Can anyone see any issues centralising affiliate links across a network?
Example - many of us would use some kind of redirect from our sites like
abc.com/go/afflink1
bcd.com/go/afflink1using either htaccess, php or javascript to redirect to the affiliate site
But as your network of site grows - to change a link involves visiting 40 sites to change each of the files in the "go" folders.
Would there be any net effect from using an otherwise vacant domain to host the links - so they only need to be changed in one place?
Example
abc/go/afflink1 links to afflinks.com/1 which then redirects to affiliate site
bcd/go/afflink1 links to afflinks.com/1 which then redirects to affiliate siteSo all your links across the network for afflink1 would point to your afflinks.com/1
Any changes only require changes to one file afflinks.com/1
Assuming there is nothing else on afflinks.com - would there be any issues? Assume all links no followed and afflinks.com noindex.
AND.... our redirects have been in place for some years using javascript,php or .htaccess. What is the current best practice for redirecting affiliate links?
-
All the methods you mention are valid as long as you nofollow them.
And if having one domain to redirect simplifies your work, then go for it.
Remember to always nofollow those links.
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
-
My affiliate links are being crawled by Google. Is this a bad thing? Also, should I add rel: nofollow to affiliate links?
Hi All, I have an issue on Google Search Console. It seems all my affiliate links are being crawled. Is this a bad thing? The reason I found out is that all but one link was flagged with a warming. It goes on to say that it was blocked by robots.txt. The strange thing is that I've not set any links to be blocked in robots.txt. Also, should affiliate links be nofollow? I'm asking because I was recently sent this article by Yoast on how to properly cloak my affiliate links without using a plugin. https://yoast.com/cloak-affiliate-links/ In the method, they apply the nofollow and noindex rules to the links. I'm just a little confused on how to go about affiliate links the SEO friendly way.
Affiliate Marketing | | nomad_blogger0 -
Does Canonical Tag passes link juice to the original URL?
We are using Canonical tags at almost all the pages of our eCommerce website. We have various sorting options like "High to Low", "Best Sellers", etc., due to this page URLs get change with some dynamic URL parameters. To avoid duplicity, we are using canonical tag on each page which point to the original url. Also, we are using IBM Coremetrics to track traffic and conversions, but to measure referral traffic in Coremetrics, we have to add tracking parameters in the URL. So, while link building we need to share URLs with Coremetrics tracking parameters in the URL, but the canonical of this page is pointing to the original URL. Suppose we have a Page that needs to be shared with Coremetrics tag: domain.com/category-name/?cm_mmc=Referral_-xyz--izUPF8VmRng--3 This Page has the canonical tag pointing to the original url: domain.com/category-name/ My question is if the URL: domain.com/category-name?cm_mmc=Referral_-xyz--izUPF8VmRng--3 got shared on other websites, will it pass link juice to the original URL: domain.com/category-name.
Affiliate Marketing | | Ramendra.Singh0 -
Affiliate Program: Does anyone know how to set this up?
Hi Guys Does anyone know how I can make a affiliate programme on my website eg - I have a sales person in two of our local regions and I want to find a way I can track any sales made through them via my website so I can pay them their commission. Any advice around this, the website is wordpress! Cheers Justin
Affiliate Marketing | | edward-may0 -
Links from Blogs and Forums
Hello Everyone, We are a small, local business in a city in Canada. We just got a new website and I am responsible for basically all of it, including the SEO. I was researching the back-links from our top-ranking competitor (another small, local business in our city). Here is their ranking: PA 40, with 441 Links from 111 RDs DA 30, with 6,864 Links from 116 RDs Here is the second-highest guy: PA 29, with 101 Links from 10 RDs DA 15, with 1,682 Links from 11 RDs As you can see, the top-ranking competitor's PA & DA are just about double his closest competitor. (Don't ask where we currently stand!) But, on closer examination, most of the links from our top-ranking competitor come from a local blog, where our competitor's ad appears in an advertisement on the sidebar. Each time they make a post, which is just about every day, our competitor gets a link. They also have a lot of links from a forum on a rock band's website. The original post was something about finding music, but the responses all have links to unrelated websites. This seems really, really slimy to me. What's going on?
Affiliate Marketing | | StillLearning0 -
Hiding Affiliate Links
Hello, Currently I'm developing a website that will contain a lot of affiliate links (5000). This is because I'm going to compare the prices of a lot of products. The visitor can go to all websites (my advertisers) that sell these products via affiliate links. My question is how to hide these affiliate links. I've read lots of solutions, like: cloaking, rel=nofollow, using JavaScript, 301 redirects. I would like to know what the best solution is to deal with these affiliate links for SEO. Regards, Martijn
Affiliate Marketing | | MartijnWijbenga290 -
My datafeed powered affiliate websites die after 3 weeks
Ok, so I've been trying something new lately: There are tons of datafeeds from webshops available on all the major affiliate networks. We thought it might be a nice idea to implement these datafeeds into your own little 'whitelabel' webshop with the power of Wordpress and a couple of plugins that help automate this process. So what we've did is this: Get a domain that is relative to the shop or products we're promoting. Install Wordpress with a plugin that enables you to import the datafeed for those products from 1 or more webshops on the affiliate networks. Each product gets an unique text by an article spinner of about a thousand words. The text on each product page is about 85% different than the others because of a massive synonym list. But each text makes perfect sense and is perfectly readable by humans. We let the system add about 20-30 pages per day so we're not flooding Google with hundreds or thousands of new pages per day because that would lead to a direct penalty. The sites look good, unique and look not much different than your average comparison site. They also have privacy policy's, contact information, newsletter subscription, sitemap, about us and all that stuff. We have masked the affiliate links because I know a lot of affiliate links might ring the alarm at Google. So overall these sites are pretty solid and look good (enough). But here is the problem: We have tried 5 of those sites so far and every time the same thing happens: the site gets indexed, gets some visitors, then quickly builds to about 20-30 visitors a day in 2-4 weeks and then BAM, it's over. Google drops the bomb on us. The sites do not get banned from the index, but they just drop a couple of hundred positions to where they don't get any traffic at all anymore. Every single time this has happened and only in 1 occasion the site "rose from the death" and came back again, but we do not know for how long this will last. So, do you have any idea what the cause of this might be? There is only one thing left I can think of and that's the age of the domain. They were all newly registered, but still, it's weird that they do work for a while and then get dropped. 2 examples of my sites are: http://www.veromodashoponline.nl and http://www.converseonline.nl (sites are in Dutch). Please help!
Affiliate Marketing | | Gioom0 -
In search of the perfect SEO affiliate ID'd URL
Hi, I'm building an affiliate system for our website, and I obviously want to gain as much SEO benifit from it as possible. So I am wondering what the optimal solution is with regard to how an affilaite URL is tagged. After looking into it a bit more - I have come up with the following. 1/. Use an affilaite URL idendifier with a #
Affiliate Marketing | | James77
EG like www.mysite.com#123 2/. 301 redirect the affilaite URL to the "real URL"
EG www.mysite.com#123 301 -> www.mysite.com What do you think of this? Thanks0 -
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