Is referral link program bad for a business and how to avoid manual penalties

[tolkin]

Hey there,

I am running a marketplace which gets millions of backlinks from all over the world due to the referral program that we are running. I think that we might get affected from those backlinks since our referrals tend to autogenerate websites and add tons of our links. They think that because they automatically create sites with the same content, styling etc they will somehow get found easier.

What would it be a best practice to avoid getting penalized for those links?

Disavowing could be an answer but we are talking for Million of Backlinks from Hundreds of Thousands of domains.

[aristotle]

How much traffic does your site get from those "millions of backlinks"?

[not2easy]

If by "referral program" you mean an affiliate program, Google knows and understands affiliate links, they can't harm your site - normally. There are "arrangements" that are different from actual managed affiliate links, some in-house arrangements might appear to be paid links. It depends on how you've set up your referral program.

[tolkin]

Hey there @aristotle and thanks for your reply even though it sounds quite sarcastic. When I said Million of backlinks I meant it.

Here is a screenshot of my Audience atm
[prntscr.com...]

also here is a screenshot of my backlink portfolio for just ONE of my Seven sites
[prntscr.com...]

Not all of them have 500 "Million Backlinks" but they are really close to that number.

@not2easy

Thanks for the reply mate and yes I mean affiliate. There is no great system in place in my honest opinion. Just a ?ref<id> after the product URL they are referring people to which gives me the ability to gather the necessary data.

Just wanted to know if Google can recognize the ?ref and if that keeps me on the safe side of things.

[keyplyr]

Yes Google can detect parameters and associate the affiliate id with your site.

Normally affiliate links are safe. However, that many artificial links may bring a red flag and get inspected. If you are sure this "affiliate" program is beyond reproach, then good. But if your gut feeling is anything suspicious going on with this program, then withdraw from it. Penalties can be severe.

There is no sure way to hide these links. If a browser can follow them to your site, so can Googlebot.

[tolkin]

Awesome. Thanks @keyply

I don't really have an issue with those links yet. Just want to make sure they will not cause an issue in the future.

Kind Regards

[keyplyr]

If your site suddenly vanishes from the SERP then at least you know why :)

[aristotle]

Hey there @aristotle and thanks for your reply even though it sounds quite sarcastic. When I said Million of backlinks I meant it.

Evidently you completely missed the point of my question. I asked you how much traffic your site gets from all of those backlinks. If it gets a lot of traffic from them, then you need to take that into account in deciding what to do with them.

So let me ask you again: How much traffic does your site get from all of those backlinks?

[Peter_S]

Just want to make sure they will not cause an issue in the future.

sigh :)

[aristotle]

Well, for whatever reason, the OP still hasn't answered my question. But the idea of "millions of backlinks" has got me to wondering.

For example, suppose that a site has 4 million backlinks. Also, suppose that, on average, each backlink sends one visitor per year. Surely that isn't too much to ask of a backlink -- one visitor per year.

At any rate, for 4 million backlinks, it adds up to 4 million visitors per year. In my opinion, that's a worthwhile amount of traffic. It would also be steady reliable traffic, unaffected by anything google does.

So is there a flaw in my analysis, and if so, what is it?

[tolkin]

Hey there Aristotle,

Sorry for the misunderstanding and the long wait for a reply.

Well, this is not exactly the case with these backlinks. Can't say that I am receiving massive amounts of traffic because of them and to be entirely honest a lot of those backlinks give me 0 traffic (if we look at this at a backlink side of view and not domain site of view).

Due to the nature of the affiliate program, a lot of those backlinks are from people that automatically generate sites and bombard them with thousands of links per site linking to thousands of products. I might receive traffic from some of them but the majority are useless links hanging in the neutral zone.

To be even more honest I think that due to the lack of content and pretty much any work on those sites I am really worried that they are going to get flagged and probably penalized and I am worried because I will have all those penalized sites pointing to my site.

Do you think that I should take some action against those backlinks? As you can appreciate manually going through almost 600 million backlinks is not the easiest process. Is there something else I can do in order to protect my site against those?

Kind Regards

[aristotle]

I must not understand your situation. I thought that the main purpose of an affiliate link is to send traffic.

I also don't understand why those other people are creating such huge numbers of links. At any rate, spammy or very low-quality backlinks will often disappear on their own, usually within a year.

[tolkin]

OK let's just take Amazon as an example.

Amazon has a number of products. Anyone can join their Affiliate Program and share those products and get money if someone buys those products through their affiliate link.

Hundreds of thousands of affiliate websites have been created with sole purpose to sell amazon products in order to gain commissions. If not all the majority of those websites are nothing but links to products with almost 0 content to accompany the links.
99% of those pages offer no traffic to Amazon and Amazon has no power over who creates those links and where he adds them.

Let's just say I own a site such as Amazon.

Even though the main purpose of an affiliate link is to send traffic that doesn't make it always the case. When anyone can become an affiliate then you also have no power to dictate which sites will contain your links.

[aristotle]

When anyone can become an affiliate

Just to clarify:
Don't they have to get an agreement with you in order for you to pay them commissions?

[tolkin]

Yes.

No where in that agreement requires them to use that link to a specific website only or to a specific DA website on that matter.

[Peter_S]

Let's just say I own a site such as Amazon.

If so, you wouldn't post here :"> (joking)

By the way, when you run an affiliate program, your provide a specific link to your affiliates. To avoid all risk of penalty, you can simply disallow robot to follow these links.

Let's say your affiliate URL is "domain/affiliate.php?..."

This can be done at the level of your robots.txt

disallow: /affiliate.php

This can be done at the level of the server answer header:

X-Robots-Tag: noindex, nofollow

[tolkin]

Hey there Peter,

The issue is that, as i said, the site has a huge number of products. Affiliates link to those products. How the system currently works is that affiliates link to products with a ?ref=<id>
at the end of each url. Not an option to URL a specific folder :)

And btw you are right. I do not own anything close to Amazon :D

[Peter_S]

In that case, you can add the X-Robots-Tag in the server answer head, when the ref parameter is present.

In PHP

if ( isset ( $_GET [ 'ref' ] ) )
{
 header("X-Robots-Tag: noindex, nofollow", true);
}

You can also add a meta tag, but I think it's more convenient to add the server header, since your script processing the affiliate tracking is certainly outside the page generation process.

This will also avoid the risk of duplicate content penalty.

[keyplyr]

Just a FYI - Bing does not support the X-Robots-Tag for noindex or nofollow. Google and Yandex do.

[Peter_S]

Just a FYI - Bing does not support the X-Robots-Tag for noindex or nofollow

From these pages , it looks like Bing does:

Bing supports the Robots Metatags detailed below. Each of these can also be emitted as X-Robots-Tag: in the response headers for the page

[bing.com...]

you can choose to emit X-Robots-Tag: noindex to the response header:

[bing.com...]

[keyplyr]

RE: Bing and X-Robots-Tag for noindex

They may say publically that they do, however they do not. I went through a year of arguments with them. I had a subdirectory for certain image files I did not want public. I used these images for paying subscribers. For that directory I used the X-Robots-Tag for noindex.

Bing indexed the images and published them in their Bing Image Search. When I complained they said Bing Image Bot did not support the X-Robots-Tag. I had to manually submit individual remove requests for 1200 images, one by one. They still have over 200 of these images published.

Whether some of their bots do and others do not is the question.

[tolkin]

Then again, noindexing and nofollowing is not the same as disavowing. So does it make a difference if I for whatever reason noindex and nofollow those pages? They have a canonical pointed to the non ?ref version too.

I am not sure this is the correct approach.

[aristotle]

As you can appreciate manually going through almost 600 million backlinks is not the easiest process. Is there something else I can do in order to protect my site against those?

If, as you indicated, those 600 million backlinks send hardly any traffic, then they should disappear on their own eventually, since most likely they cost more to create than they are earning.