Forum Moderators: skibum
I am looking for advice on setting up affiliate systems which are search engine friendly, any articles or information online would be helpful.
The main effort is to maintain the pagerank of the site by finding a way to create affiliate links which would still count as backlinks to the search engines. Can this be done?
The other thing i worry about is third party sites which may be using strange methods to promote their affiliation links. Are there things which can be done by the affiliates using the links which might damage the search engine rankings of the main website? If so does anyone know of a system to stop this?
Any advice appreciated especially from members who have personal experince in these areas and anyone who may know of websites which might have useful information on this subject.
Or at least if there is, it's top secret...
;-)
This will help us understand your issue better.
It appears that the website has a PR0 and no backlinks in google but it has lots of backlinks in other search engines - this gives me the impression that its been penalised but i can't see anything spammy within the html, however i did find some very strange linking methods being used by their affiliates.
If this is the case i need to know how i could make their affilite system more secure to stop this and at the same time if i could make the affiliate code search engine friendly it would be a bonus.
Where 12345 is my affiliate ID and then they use a javascript to read the #12345 from URL and write a cookie for me.
[edited by: jcoronella at 11:58 pm (utc) on Nov. 22, 2004]
[edit reason] unlinked [/edit]
Anyone think this will work for google? Anyone tried it?
for example, will backlinks to www.widget.com/#1234 pass the same pr as a link to www.widget.com?
As a merchanr/advertiser, you can run an affiliate program with them.
They place a tag on the merchant site and track the referer source (your affiliate site).
Basically you simply link to the merchant web site without using any affiliate link (with parameters or other format). If true and working, this technology will help tremendously the merchants on the SEO side of their business. Think about 500 affiliates linking to the hommepage of their site! Nice number of incoming links, wouldn't it be?!
JM
For example.. if you had 10,000 affiliates thats a lot of queries for the HTTP_REFERER to calculate everytime someone visits the site.
Is this really possible?
thats a lot of queries for the HTTP_REFERERwhy do you think that? to access HR takes exactly the same time as a getenv(QUERY_STRING)... you can do both a couple million times a second.
Could they be aware of the HTTP_REFERER making queries to anything which enters the site?
I am concerned that this technique might be deemed unethical to the search engines and if they pick up on it they might penalise the site in question.
As far as dealing with questionable linking methods goes, I would suggest strict warnings against spam and illegal content with the guaranteed consequence of disabling their affiliate IDs if they do not comply. I would also suggest upline mentoring and sending out emails, so that your affiliates know what is legal and what isn't.
Isaiah Hull
From my experience and from the publisher point of view if Google understands that you are pointing to an affiliate site will downgrade your page in its SERPS.
I've got a dozen or so moderately competitive keyphrases where I rank #1 and I use straight aff links (ok I've been too lazy to change them), and the competitors use CGI or javascript. That's not to say that there aren't other valid reasons to not use straight aff links, but from where I sit, right now it's either not that important a part of the algo, or something that can be easily overcome with other factors.
