Forum Moderators: skibum
I am planning to start an affiliate program in the next week.
What will the impact of the affiliate links be on SEO?
Does it matter how I structure the links?
for instance
given that all affiliates end up at
www.domain.com
does
www.domain.com?aff=123
have a different SEO impact than
www.domain.com/partners/program/affiliate.php?aff=123
thanks for any insight!
Jon
If you 301 all the affiliate links to www.example.com then your best affiliates will drop you like a hot potato, since you are effectively stealing their efforts to promote your site - and they will figure this out very quickly.
You need to consider whether you are using affiliates to generate sales, or if you are using them for SEO. Two very different critters.
That said, I am very interested in what folks have to say about dup content issues and affiliate links.
I am not proposing doing anything unusual, so I was surprised by this line:
If you 301 all the affiliate links to www.example.com then your best affiliates will drop you like a hot potato, since you are effectively stealing their efforts to promote your site - and they will figure this out very quickly.
I thought all affiliate software does a 301 redirect from the affiliate link to a specified landing page while simultaneously logging the referral and adding an affiliate cookie.
When I have promoted other people's affiliate systems, my experience is the url the user ends up on is not my affilate.php?id=123 url, but some other url.
Anyway, I guess my question boils down to: is there a "best practices" way to structure affiliate links, or does it not really matter?
In general, an affiliate program will have NO DIRECT IMPACT on SEO. The search engines appear to recognize redirects and mostly treat them as links to the ultimate destination page, not any intermediate URL. Google appears to exclude affiliate links as "inbound links" when computing PageRank.
An affiliate program may have some "indirect" effects on SEO, including potentially accelerating the indexing of your site, and of course anything that increases traffic to your site is likely to accelerate external linking to your site, bookmarking, word-of-mouth, AND may be recognized by toolbars (Alexa, Google).
