SEO value of affiliate external links
-
There are websites that have linked to my site. Whenever I hover over link I see my direct website URL and I am not seeing "no follow" when viewing source code so I assume these are passing link juice. However when I click on link it directs briefly to shareasale (affiliate account) in web address bar, but then quickly directs back to my website URL as directed. I was curious if these good links I am acquiring truly pass juice or since they briefly pass through an affiliate site if that cancels or dilutes the link juice. Also I am noticing when inspecting element that after the HREF it says class="external-link"
I am just not sure if my link building efforts are being ruined by having an affiliate account running.I did not tell them I had one. I guess they are searching to see that I have one and trying to make a few extra commission dollars.
-
I see a ton of churn with small, boutique merchants, and even the large ones have been grumbling lately about not wanting to support certain types of websites. I think it really depends on how effectively you're able to leverage your publishers, but as with everything you get a lot of merchants who join up with no idea how to do that.
-
This is how I see it work in practice when a merchant closes their ShareASale program:
our nice clean cloaked link --303--> shareasale affiliate link --302--> Destination URL (status code 200)
Assuming that the links you're seeing aren't cloaked, even if the user who clicks on an old ShareASale affiliate link does in fact land on your site, they're still getting pushed to the destination page through a 302. So there's not going to be much SEO value in these links, if there's any at all.
In our case, when a SAS program dies, the destination page is the front page of our site, not the merchant's site. This may be an account setting somewhere within our publisher account or something customizable, but it's not something the merchant gets to control.
-
Hi Nicholas,
To lead on from what others have said, I'd agree that these links are unlikely to be passing value from a ranking perspective i.e. they're not likely to pass PageRank. Google do try and detect affiliate links and as Matt has said, they see these as placed to get affiliate revenue as opposed to being placed because someone genuinely endorses the website in question.
In terms of how this actually works, I'm not too familiar with Sharesale personally. But I know that similar affiliate programs provide plugins / scripts to affiliates which can make the link look natural, but when clicked, some JavaScript kicks in and adds the affiliate URL and the redirect. The website owner themselves can also do this themselves if they want to "mask" the affiliate link so that when someone hovers over the link, they see a nice clean URL rather than a potentially long and messy affiliate link.
In terms of what you can do - it really comes down to whether you value the traffic from the affiliate and if that drives revenue. If it does, then that's more valuable (I'd guess) than having a normal link. Plus, would they actually link to you at all if they couldn't get affiliate revenue? If not, then stepping out of the affiliate program may cause more harm than good. But it's really a balance between the affiliate revenue and potential link benefit.
I hope that helps a bit!
Paddy
-
I didn't see anything about these links showing up in GSC. If that's the case, please let us know. I have seen links show up there before that first 302 redirect to another site. In theory, these shouldn't pass pagerank, but historically Google has had some trouble figuring out 302s.
Nicholas, I agree with Matt Antonio as well. If the link the href tag goes to a ShareaSale URL it should not pass pagerank.
However, it looks like instead of just going through a 302 redirect, affiliate links like the one below just go to a 200 (OK) status page, which uses javascript (window.location.replace) to send the user on to the merchant's site. It doesn't surprise me that this could become an issue now that Google is so good at crawling javascript. But they are still pretty terrible about figuring out what it "means" in terms of what should show in the search results.
Are merchants still getting good ROI from programs on massive affiliate networks? It's been awhile since I've seen that work in a brand's favor over the long term.
-
The links ARE setup like this Link to your product
I am confused on how it knows to briefly direct to Shareasale. In this source code there is nothing that looks out of place. It looks like a completely normal link except it does contain the verbiage class="external-link" other than that it looks regular. These links are ALSO showing up in webmaster tools as DO FOLLOW.
-
A link can't be direct to your site, then refer back to shareasale, then redirect back to your site unless you've set it up that way somehow.
So if someone builds a shareasale link like:
This is going to shareasale. If you quit shareasale and they said it would still go directly to you, they're just not planting their tracking cookie on the intermediate step. Everything else would remain the same.
If the link is something like:
Link to product and somehow that goes from your site, to shareasale, back to your site - well that's definitely not helping you very much for SEO and if you quit, yes that would then go directly to your site - but only if you reconfigured how the links were working since this type of linking would require a lot of special work to make it happen. It's more likely it's the 1st example.
In any case, they both pass through Shareasale and, per Matt Cutts, Google is attempting to not give you credit for that link. Whether or not they do, I can't say - but they're attempting not to. I'm not sure which part of my previous answer may not be "completely true."
-
I am not sure if this is completely true, however I contacted Shareasale about these links. I asked them if I were to close my Shareasale account, they said the link would then just directly go to me. The anchor link is indeed directly pointing to my site. I am not sure how google can read that it is affiliate looking at source code alone?
-
Matt is correct, link as redirect from affiliate site doesn't pass link juice, but it does count as a link with several other search engines, such as Bing usually do pass. Also I am strong believer in Matt Cutts theory, but he hasn't been part of Google for quite some times, Google is rolling out unnamed algorithms, meaning everything is possible specially if you are finding those links in webmaster search console.
-
These type of links are generally demoted/do not pass juice in the first place.
Matt Cutts said in the past in an interview with Eric Enge:
Matt Cutts: Typically, we want to handle those sorts of links appropriately. A lot of the time, that means that the link is essentially driving people for money, so we usually would not count those as an endorsement.
To me, Shareasale is a huge provider of affiliate links so I would assume Google is well onto those links and doesn't count them. You aren't going to get a ranking benefit from these links, IMO.
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
-
How Many Links to Disavow at Once When Link Profile is Very Spammy?
We are using link detox (Link Research Tools) to evaluate our domain for bad links. We ran a Domain-wide Link Detox Risk report. The reports showed a "High Domain DETOX RISK" with the following results: -42% (292) of backlinks with a high or above average detox risk
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
-8% (52) of backlinks with an average of below above average detox risk
-12% (81) of backlinks with a low or very low detox risk
-38% (264) of backlinks were reported as disavowed. This look like a pretty bad link profile. Additionally, more than 500 of the 689 backlinks are "404 Not Found", "403 Forbidden", "410 Gone", "503 Service Unavailable". Is it safe to disavow these? Could Google be penalizing us for them> I would like to disavow the bad links, however my concern is that there are so few good links that removing bad links will kill link juice and really damage our ranking and traffic. The site still ranks for terms that are not very competitive. We receive about 230 organic visits a week. Assuming we need to disavow about 292 links, would it be safer to disavow 25 per month while we are building new links so we do not radically shift the link profile all at once? Also, many of the bad links are 404 errors or page not found errors. Would it be OK to run a disavow of these all at once? Any risk to that? Would we be better just to build links and leave the bad links ups? Alternatively, would disavowing the bad links potentially help our traffic? It just seems risky because the overwhelming majority of links are bad.0 -
Our site is on a secure server (https) will a link to http:// be of less value?
Our site is hosted on a secure network (I.E. Our web address is - https://www.workbooks.com). Will a backlink pointing to: http://www.workbooks.com provide less value than a link pointing to: https://www.workbooks.com ? Many thanks, Sam
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Sam.at.Moz0 -
Link Building
I have to develop a strategy for link building. The SEO guy I have been speaking with has started putting links on .edu sites etc . To me - this "stinks" of manipulating the search engines - which I know we will get stung by at some point. I hope this isn't standard practice - but I don't know what the best way to improve rankings in terms of links etc. We sell health products and are starting to put out 3-4 high quality articles per week. Ideas? Kind Regards Martin
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | s_EOgi_Bear1 -
Advice on Link Building?
I know webmasters shouldn't focus on link building but unfortunately there are some types of content that doesn't get shared as much as other. And for content to go viral, it ain't that easy and it's almost impossible in some smaller niches where you don't have the volume to go "viral". That said I know about the common link building techniques. I know I can submit guest posts but when you're competing with websites that have over 10,000 backlinks, there is no way I'm going to get close to this with guest posting and commenting on other blogs. One way I found for getting backlinks is to publish interviews. Most of the time, people/businesses you interview like to link to this type of content. Publishing value-added content about other businesses' products or services may get some backlinks in return but not that often. So other than that, can some of you share some "out-of-the-box" link building strategies? Thank you in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sbrault740 -
Ajax website and SEO
Hi all, A client of mine has a website similar to Pintrest. All in Ajax/. So imagine an ajax-grid based animal lover site called domain.com. The domain has three different Categories Cats, Dogs, Mice. When you click on a category, the site doesn't handle the URL and doesn't change the domain So instead of the domain going from domain.com to domain.com/cats, it uses the Ajax script and just shows all the cat pins. and when you click on each pin/post it opens a page such as domain.com/Pin/123/PostTitle It doesn't reference the category. However a page domain.com/cats does exist and you can go there directly. Is this an SEO issue for not grouping all pins under a category? How does Google handle Ajax these days, it use to be real bad but if Pintrest is going so well i'm assuming times have changed? Any other things to be wary of for a grid based/ajax site? I am happy to pay for an hour or two for a more in depth audit/tips if you can feed back on the above. Fairly urgent. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Profero1 -
Predictive SEO
Hello all, I am trying to perform a predictive competitive SEO analysis to estimate what I will need to do to surpass my competitors. I am unsure of how to do this and would like some advice or link to an article. What I am trying to do is predict where I can rank in three months, six months and one year as well as what I need to do compared to my competitors. Specifically also to estimate how many links I would need to acquire to both my page as well as domain. I have already pulled my competitors domain links, page links, and age. Adam
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | digitalops0 -
Dynamic Links vs Static Links
There are under 100 pages that we are trying to rank for and we'd like to flatten our site architecture to give them more link juice. One of the methods that is currently in place now is a widget that dynamically links to these pages based on page popularity...the list of links could change day to day. We are thinking of redesigning the page to become more static, as we believe it's better for link juice to flow to those pages reliably than dynamically. Before we do so, we need a second opinion.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RBA0 -
Linking to Authorities
Hello, I know that if its good for the user, its not a bad move. But for this question I am specifically asking for how it affects my ranking. Does it help my ranking to link to appropriate authority sites?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tylerfraser
Have you done any tests to see if linking out to authoritative sites like .gov info pages, industry leaders, etc. help with a sites ranking. I am thinking about taking of all of these outgoing links and just link to my important pages. Thank you, Tyler0