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I am thinking of other techniques to build up my natural links for seo. One of my clients has almost 1000 affiliates, about 500 active affiliates. Currently the affiliate programs we use are seo unfriendly, meaning they really don't help us build up natural backlinks. Has anyone used any programs that use "natural" affiliate links? I am looking for a way to take advantage of all the affiliate links we have coming into our site.
Thanks!
I am looking for a way to take advantage of all the affiliate links we have coming into our site.
Right. And you'll pay the affiliates a fixed monthly rate for this additional benefit will you? Or you'll just take advantage of it and give them zero compensation for their hard work?
This is a tough issue though if the said merchant is solely using these links to help themselves out and disregarding the welfare of the hardworking affiliates.
I feel that all the affilate links may have no link juice.. BUT they seem to help Google understand that MY SITE is the MERCHANT ( authority) site. So I rank #1 for the relevant key phrase. The affiliates rely on other long tails / related traffic etc.
I am not trying to cut out affiliates at all.
So in addition to paying affiliates commission on the sales they refer to merchants, you will also pay them an ongoing monthly rate for the static links they provide, raising the profile of merchant sites in any assessment conducted by the search engines?
This will make you a pioneer in the industry. I am sure it will be technically possible and wish you the best of luck.
It was just a question...dealing with SEO. I am not out to destroy the affiliate...sorry your taking this so personal.
I just wanted to know since the links were already in place, if there was a way to benefit from this.
No serious affiliates are going to engage in a link scheme designed to help a merchant outrank them for their own keywords. Maybe affiliates that buy traffic via PPC would be OK with it, although they probably don't have much juice in the first place, but not affiliates that rely on organic traffic.
No serious affiliates are going to engage in a link scheme designed to help a merchant outrank them for their own keywords.
Unless the merchant is fairly incidental to their topic in which case I think many would be happy to choose the rewarded natural link option.
vetofunk, why not try giving affiliates a choice between a paid natural referral link and an unpaid SEO-unfriendly referral link and see what the takeup is?
I would be totally open to giving affiliates an extra percentage for a natural link back. That was one idea was thinking about, but just questioning if it was an easy transition to make affilate links already out there more seo friendly.
How is the URL structured? What happens when a person clicks on one of your affiliate links? Do they go to an affiliate specific subfolder? Is it a redirect that sends the visitor to the homepage?
All of those factor into what you can/are able to do.
It's great that you're willing to reward affiliates in some way for the value of the link love they provide, but given Google's recent penalizing of websites selling paid links, I wouldn't touch that scheme with a 10-foot pole.
www.MerchantDomain.com?refid=2735633849
look like this
www.MerchantDomain.com/
I offered to help by asking some questions which he/she did not answer so I am not going to bother with this. But it is very possible to program software to work without the referid.
I think people are blowing this out of proportion.
No, I don't think so.
Often, the merchant considers that the affiliate links pointing to their site are "their links".
They're not. They're the affiliates' links.
I just wanted to be clear that vetofunk did realise who the links belong to. (Credit to vetofunk that he/she does).
The reason I have jumped on this is because I am in the process of negotiating with a merchant who has now decided to dynamically show PPC ads on his pages which appear before the main sales units come up. So I send the merchant a load of traffic, he gets a huge benefit (about 80% of the traffic I am sending is now disappearing into a black hole) and pays not a penny for it.
I will try to get him to see reason, but the jury is out at this point.
I am getting tired of affiliates and their hard-won traffic not being taken seriously.
For affiliates' hard-won search engine status to also be taken for granted is just really taking the biscuit.
Qualified traffic is an asset. Search engine status is an asset. No, merchants cannot have it for free.
Affiliates don't just FTP a couple of scrappy pages onto a server and collect their bucket of money, they work damn hard.
That's why natural links, if requested, need to be compensated for as sponsor links by the CPA merchants requesting them.
The url's on the affiliate sites look like this:
[affiliate.domain.com...] which redirects to [domain.com...]
and
[3rdpartydomain.com...] which redirects to [domain.com...]
I know changing them could be a problem for me, and espcially for my affiliates. That's why I would try to compensate them in any way possible. Everyone is after incoming links these days, so this was just an idea I had to take advantage of the links that are already coming into our site.
I don't see how this would a problem with Google. I am not really paying our affiliates for links. I am paying them more for to change the structure on technique they use to send traffic to us.
For that site, there really isn't much you can do.
If I'm reading you right, the other site uses third party software, but is still going through a subdomain of your site...correct?
That has some possibilities depending on if you are able to customize the software at all.
[edited by: Philosopher at 3:10 pm (utc) on Oct. 24, 2007]
I'm not asserting that such a penalty exists, and in fact I don't see how affiliate links are any worse than any other form of ad network code, but it's been postulated many times that Google could be scanning for them.
Another reason to use redirects is to have reliable stats of the outbound clicks you're sending a program. You can't expect your log records to match the merchant's reports exactly, but seeing that they're in basic agreement helps build trust when you're trying out a new affiliate program.
[edited by: jomaxx at 4:11 pm (utc) on Oct. 24, 2007]
I've seen many affiliate sponsors try to bleed affiliate links for PR, to even include the ever-so-clueless, "Don't worry, we track the traffic by referrer."
None worked.
To be more blunt: You have two choices here, either manage a solid affiliate program or run a link building campaign. You cannot do the latter on top of the former. At least not very effectively for either.
Just my two cents.
Another thought: Keep in mind that most of the negative comments in this thread are from successful affiliates, those you want to attract to your program. If we think it's a no-go, well, maybe you should rethink things.
