My affiliate links are being crawled by Google. Is this a bad thing? Also, should I add rel: nofollow to affiliate links?
-
Hi All,
I have an issue on Google Search Console. It seems all my affiliate links are being crawled. Is this a bad thing? The reason I found out is that all but one link was flagged with a warming. It goes on to say that it was blocked by robots.txt. The strange thing is that I've not set any links to be blocked in robots.txt.
Also, should affiliate links be nofollow? I'm asking because I was recently sent this article by Yoast on how to properly cloak my affiliate links without using a plugin. https://yoast.com/cloak-affiliate-links/ In the method, they apply the nofollow and noindex rules to the links. I'm just a little confused on how to go about affiliate links the SEO friendly way.
-
I was facing the same issue on my site. After checking a few guides, here is what I found
-
Make them no-follow (better add the new sponsored tag in them)
-
Yes, it is a bad thing
-
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
-
Google is mixing a product name with a technical term (both have same name)
Google is mixing a programming term name with a home product and ranking that programming website on top. And there is another 2 search results from the same website (DA - 56, PA - 55, Links - 71K, RD - 4500). Their positions are 1, 2 and 3. But the question/ answer section is showing question/ answer for both of the products, and there is local section, top stories, images, videos, Wikipedia, amazon, ad and an e-commerce site which is showing the home product. There are in total 7 results, and 1 ad. Google also showing description of both of the products on the right. 1,2,3 - Programming website, 4. Amazon, 5. Wikipedia, 6. Wikipedia, 7. E-commerce How difficult it could be to outrank the top result?
Affiliate Marketing | | Rafialam040 -
Affiliate marketing for our Amazon Products ??
Hi Guys. Can any recommend or is it possible to build an affiliate marketing programme to generate sales from our Amazon product pages rather the the traditional way of generating sales through your own website ? Can anyone advise ? Or recommend any companies ? Thanks Gareth
Affiliate Marketing | | GAZ090 -
Affiliate marketing dead?
I have created a network of travel websites that I have decided to promote little by little.. Also so they getdomain age and google trust.... but now when you search for all my main keyphrases... you either have wikitravel,lonelyplanet,frommers and other big brand. I guess that Google gave them better value as to get trusted travel information... However, it seems it will be very difficult to rank my sites. I could do long tail keyphrases but again might not be worth it... I used to work as a SEO consultant for other travel sites selling products... they still rank pretty well as they are sites of value selling something.. of course threy compete with other sites but we are in the same level. How can you compete with loneyplanet with your affiliate site because I am not selling anything on my sites. I am pretty much desperate. I designed a network of 30 sites... all good content with good SEO on the page... of course, I will be honest. I might have to change the content to make it better... you can check one of my site here; www.simplyparis.org it is worth it or better stop this project and focus on 1 product oriented website ? Is anyone working as an affiliate marketer with experience after google panda and pinguin ? is affiliate marketing dead in 2013 now?
Affiliate Marketing | | sandyallain0 -
Which affiliate programs pass the best SEO value through their links?
How good is Google at detecting the affiliate nature of those links? How does this rate as a linkbuilding strategy?
Affiliate Marketing | | menachemp0 -
How accurate is google analytics?
I have a new site that has just entered the SERPS so I'm tracking stats pretty carefully using google analytics. Yesterday according to my affiliate stats I had 10 unique visits with 2 sign ups for one of my products but google analytics only shows a total of 5 visitors yesterday on my site? ( A 20% conversion rate 2 out of 5 also seems ridiculously high). I'm guessing there were also a number of users that visited my site but didn't click through one of the affiliate links and just browsed the site so the visitor number could be higher? I'm not sure where this huge discrepancy comes from?
Affiliate Marketing | | SamCUK0 -
My datafeed powered affiliate websites die after 3 weeks
Ok, so I've been trying something new lately: There are tons of datafeeds from webshops available on all the major affiliate networks. We thought it might be a nice idea to implement these datafeeds into your own little 'whitelabel' webshop with the power of Wordpress and a couple of plugins that help automate this process. So what we've did is this: Get a domain that is relative to the shop or products we're promoting. Install Wordpress with a plugin that enables you to import the datafeed for those products from 1 or more webshops on the affiliate networks. Each product gets an unique text by an article spinner of about a thousand words. The text on each product page is about 85% different than the others because of a massive synonym list. But each text makes perfect sense and is perfectly readable by humans. We let the system add about 20-30 pages per day so we're not flooding Google with hundreds or thousands of new pages per day because that would lead to a direct penalty. The sites look good, unique and look not much different than your average comparison site. They also have privacy policy's, contact information, newsletter subscription, sitemap, about us and all that stuff. We have masked the affiliate links because I know a lot of affiliate links might ring the alarm at Google. So overall these sites are pretty solid and look good (enough). But here is the problem: We have tried 5 of those sites so far and every time the same thing happens: the site gets indexed, gets some visitors, then quickly builds to about 20-30 visitors a day in 2-4 weeks and then BAM, it's over. Google drops the bomb on us. The sites do not get banned from the index, but they just drop a couple of hundred positions to where they don't get any traffic at all anymore. Every single time this has happened and only in 1 occasion the site "rose from the death" and came back again, but we do not know for how long this will last. So, do you have any idea what the cause of this might be? There is only one thing left I can think of and that's the age of the domain. They were all newly registered, but still, it's weird that they do work for a while and then get dropped. 2 examples of my sites are: http://www.veromodashoponline.nl and http://www.converseonline.nl (sites are in Dutch). Please help!
Affiliate Marketing | | Gioom0 -
Duplicate versions of pages on my site are getting indexed by Google...I think...
Hello, Our site has a very high bounce rate, which in part is down to a slightly old fashioned design, and also because we are a retailer and I imagine many visitors are simply quickly comparing prices and then leaving. However, having had a look in Google Analytics, I think that there is another issue that is contributing to a very high bounce rate. When I look in Content > Top Content, and order the pages in order of Bounce Rate, high to low, there are hundreds of instances of pages with just one or two visits in the last month, and a 100% bounce rate. The links are the same as our home page or pages on our website, but with extra letters and numbers at the end of the url. We have an affiliate scheme, which provides our affiliates with unique codes for the products they want to link to, and my guess is that these urls are getting indexed. I've looked at a few other links, and they go to translated versions of a page from our website, generated by Google. Other urls seem to have been generated by search results from our own search on the website. What worries me is that there are lots and lots of versions of the same page, with slightly different urls. I am by no means an SEO expert - I work for a very small company and am basically learning as I go - but I know that duplicate content is bad news. If the pages were on our own site, we could use 301s to redirect, but what about translated versions, or urls generated by affiliate schemes, or search results? Many thanks, Sophy
Affiliate Marketing | | sophycolbert0 -
Passing Google Analytics Variables Through Javascript?
Alright so here's my situation and hopefully someone can help... I want to be able to pass Google Analytics variables onto my affiliate links so I have some better conversion tracking data (not PPC traffic so no easy dynamic keyword insertion variables). I want to do something like this: User searches "keyword" in Google > User lands on mysite.com > search data is assigned to global variables that I can use in my affiliate link redirect script. afflink.com/?id=123&keyword=[GA keyword variable] Anybody know how I would go about doing that? I've seen other Non-GA tracking scripts do this but I can't figure it out here and it's driving me crazy! Thanks,
Affiliate Marketing | | drewhammond
Drew EDIT: Just figured it out after a lot of guess and testing... I'm not sure if the way I'm doing it is the fastest, most optimized way but it works. Solution: I can pull the GA cookie and break it down to retrieve the keyword using PHP. For anyone searching for this in the future, here's how I did it: $gacookie = $_COOKIE['__utmz'];
$keyword = substr(strstr($gacookie, 'utmctr='),7); ?> Then I can use the $keyword variable wherever I need it. I haven't actually tested this on a live site yet but everything is working fine as of right now. If anyone has a better solution please feel free to answer.0