Are links to our website through our affiliate program hurting our rankings?
-
We have an affiliate program for an educational related course product and I am becoming worried that links to us on our affiliate's websites are hurting our site rankings. I have read that google is usually pretty good about picking up on affiliate links and not giving the follow links credit, but not sure if that is just for the big affiliate networks or if they can spot less obvious affiliate programs.
With this in mind, would you ask all affiliates to use the nofollow tag on all links coming in, or would you make sure that the links are more branded in nature? There are a mix of text links along with banners and other display components. There would be editing that would need to be done to the core files of our affiliate/member software (aMember Pro) to make all links nofollow and we want to see if there are other recommendations before doing so.
We are trying to fight out way out of what we believe is an over-optimized anchor text penalty and are evaluating all areas that we can make improvements.
Any advice is greatly appreciated!
-
Thanks for the suggestion Everett. I have the Wordpress plugin Pretty Link already installed so your solution would be really easy to set up and I plan on doing so.
Thanks!
-
If you can make those links nofollow by updating files within your affiliate software I'd opt for that route over asking affiliates to add a nofollow tag. If you can't update existing links that way you'll have to ask the affiliates to update them.
Don't rely on affiliates to add the nofollow tag for you going forward. Give it to them in the code they copy from the site.
I like to recommend sending all affiliate links through an external redirect first. For example, you might have www.YourAffiliateDomain.com/?afflink=123, which would then 302 redirect to the page they want to link to. This way if anything ever goes wrong you can kill off that domain and get rid of all of those incoming links in a flash. They'd also be going through a 302 prior to hitting your main site so no pagerank would be getting passed and you'd be in good graces with Google whether those links were nofollowed or not.
-
I will check every website which links to me, then ask the people with bad/duplicate content to add a nofollow link.
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
-
Should I apply Canonical Links from my Landing Pages to Core Website Pages?
I am working on an SEO project for the website: https://wave.com.au/ There are some core website pages, which we want to target for organic traffic, like this one: https://wave.com.au/doctors/medical-specialties/anaesthetist-jobs/ Then we have basically have another version that is set up as a landing page and used for CPC campaigns. https://wave.com.au/anaesthetists/ Essentially, my question is should I apply canonical links from the landing page versions to the core website pages (especially if I know they are only utilising them for CPC campaigns) so as to push link equity/juice across? Here is the GA data from January 1 - April 30, 2019 (Behavior > Site Content > All Pages😞
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Wavelength_International0 -
Temporarily redirecting a small website to a specific url of another website
Hi, I would like to redirect a small website that contains info about a specific project temporarily to a specific url about this project on my main website. Reason for this is that the small website doesn't contain accurate info anymore. We will adapt the content in the next few weeks and then remove the redirect again. Should I set up a 301 or a 302? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mat_C1 -
Reasonable to Ask URL of Link from SEO Providing New Links before Link Activation?
My firm has hired an SEO to create links to our site. We asked the SEO to provide a list of domains that they are targeting for potential links. The SEO did not agree to this request on the grounds that the list is their unique intellectual property. Alternatively I asked the SEO to provide the URL that will be linking to our site before the link is activated. The SEO did not agree to this. However, they did say we could provide comments afterwards so they could tweak their efforts when the next 4-5 links are obtained next month. The SEO is adamant that the links will not be spam. For whatever it is worth the SEO was highly recommended. I am an end user; the owner and operator of a commercial real estate site, not an SEO or marketing professional. Is this protectiveness over process and data typical of link building providers? I want to be fair with the provider and hope I will be working with them a long time, however I want to ensure I receive high quality links. Should I be concerned? Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
Alan0 -
Checking Rankings Again & Again Can Drop Rankings
Is it possible that if i check my google rankings again & again it can drop ranking?Like checking where do my keywords rank every hours rank drop the rankings? Because this indirectly affects the CTR. Might be because of it? No one has faced such an weird thing before.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | welcomecure0 -
Can't understand our Ranking; DA, PA and On Page all better than Competiton; Ranking no where
Our rankings are up and down but our domain is clean, DA and PA good
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AlexSTUDIO18
and there is really in depth content which is all original. We are at a bit of a loss; The site is
http://www.fightstorepro.com I can use the phrase "Boxing Gloves" as an example
http://www.fightstorepro.com/gear/gloves/boxing-gloves.html PA 26 , DA29
Good original content; Video content, On page grade A
Not ranking in top 50 places?? The competitor in Pos4 is not matching our placing Anyone shed any light on this?0 -
App "Review" Website with DA of 58 - Good or Bad Link?
Hi, We have a web app. All our competitors are on http://www.appappeal.com. We can suggest ourselves here http://www.appappeal.com/contact/suggest. If we get reviewed and the link is a follow link is this a good thing or a bad thing. They call themselves a directory and you can pay to get a "priority" review. Should we avoid or is it a good link as the DA is 58?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Studio330 -
Two identical websites need ranking locally
Hi Wondering if someone can advise. We have two websites with a .ie domian and .co.uk domain (e-commerce stores) The websites are identical so we need to address duplicate content issue. The issue we have is we are targeting both local Google to rank, google.ie and google.co.uk. Obviously to handle duplicate content we are going to have to "rel can" the one of the websites, which will probably be the .ie domain. Question is, will this effect the ranking within the .ie domian on google.ie. And any advice on how anyone else handles this situation would be greatly appreciated, we have had no issue ranking before with one domain on a local search engine, but this is the first time we have come across needing to rank two domains with identical content on each local search engine Thanks in advance John
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Johnny4B0 -
Optimising My Website Link Containers
Hi, I'm looking at my links containers and trying to optimise them. I would be greatful if anyone can give me some feedback on my plan for perfect optimaisation. My links are constructed as follows: I have a two states:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | James77
1/. A Non Hover state which contains an Image and Text
2/. A Hover state which contains a bit more text - I do this as containing full text on the non hover state would not be good for users and would look ugly as well. Here's an example block of the HTML - as you can see from the URL, its quite a deep page level. From the URL and Alt / Titles the Page I am Linking to is about: "The Royal Hotel Accommodation New York Holidays". I Just a bit confused on how I should apply ALT and Title (Titles in particular) attributes given the nested DiV's etc - I can apply these to parent level, or apply all levels, or apply them to a mix. Also is there any obvious thinks you can think of I am missing that may help onsite SEO? Thanks in Advance CURRENT UNOPTIMISED CODE:
The Royal Hotel
New York Holidays Accommodation
The Royal Hotel
MY OPTIMISED CODE (Adding Title and Alt attributes):
The Royal Hotel
New York Holidays Accommodation
The Royal Hotel
0