Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Can affiliate links benefit or hurt my seo?
-
I have just signed up with a company to do affiliate marketing for my site. I am now in the process of reaching out to publishers and seeing who will publish my link on their site. Is there any benefit in terms of seo for having these links, and can there be any potential downside to these links as well?
-
I did a bit of Affiliate marketing for Crakrevenue a few months back White, and one thing I advise that affiliates aren't going to tell you proactively is to add rel="nofollow" on your affiliate link.
My adult affiliate site was very easy to drive substantial traffic hitting the right hot spots, and I ranked it pretty quick. In short order, many of the affiliates I was advertising for had less authority than me. So to avoid passing all that hard work to get authority to someone who was merely paying me for traffic, adding the nofollow tag was a quick fix.
You definitely WILL NOT get a benefit in SEO from an affiliate, that would just be to easy!

-
Hi again!
I think the question you are asking has been already answered in this community right here:
https://a-moz.groupbuyseo.org/community/q/is-affiliate-duplicate-content
The conclusion is to:
- OPTION 1) Avoid identical content on affiliate sites and demand affiliate sites to write their own original content.
- OPTION 2) Demand affiliate sites to canonicalize their urls with duplicated content to your urls.
Hope that helps

-
Thank you so much for sharing this highly informative article. I have a question regarding the data feed description and duplicate content issue. If the product description on my website and the description in the product feed given to the affiliate site is identical can my site suffer due to this duplicate content or can this only negatively effect the affiliate site?
-
Hi,
I recommend you to read this article from Nicole Grodesky that explains very well the effects of affiliate marketing & links on SEO:
https://powerdigitalmarketing.com/blog/how-does-affiliate-marketing-affect-seo/
Greetings!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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
-
What are he benefits of getting 200+ links from DA 40+ non-relevant websites?
I have a client who has an opportunity to sponsor a prestigious national organisation. In return, they will get 200+ links from the websites of the organisation's members. Most of which are DA 40+.None of the linking sites have any relevance to my client's industry.1) How likely do you think it is that Google will view these as paid links?2) Do you feel that there is potential harm in gaining this many non-relevant links in a short time-frame?3) The client wants me to quantify the ranking benefits of gaining these links and calculate a potential ROI. If that's even possible, how would you go about that?Thanks in advance
Link Building | | richdan2 -
How can I find all the outbound links from a website domain?
I want to find all the outbound links (basically whatever comes in <a>tag) from a domain (say www.abc.com) as well as all the subdomains under it (say abc.com/a etc). Open Site Explorer provides the inbound links from a website but does not provide any functionality to get all the outbound links from a website. Is it possible to do?</a> <a>Thanks in advance. Deepak Jain</a>
Link Building | | Deepak_Jain0 -
A link with "return false"- OSE sees as a No Followed Link
Hello, I couldn't find a clear answer to the impact on SEO for a link written in this way: [" class="expert_info" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">](w</span>ww.yourwebsite.com<span style=) [Does the "return false" act as a "no follow"? I came across this in our link data in Open Site Explorer which lists these links all as "no follows." However, an engineer I spoke to said that it shouldn't impact search engine behavior. Any ideas? Thank you in advance! -Sarah K.](w</span>ww.yourwebsite.com<span style=)
Link Building | | OneMedical0 -
Link Detox and Link Removal
I have a question about which links to remove after running a link detox from Link Research Tools. First a little back story. I had had an SEO company link building for one of the websites I own. But I have recently stopped working with them. In the last month my rankings have near dropped off the charts. I have just recently gotten access to Google webmaster tools and noticed an unnatural link warning from back in March. So yesterday I ran link detox and it reported 19 toxic links, 120 suspicious links, and 24 healthy links. It's rather obvious that I should remove all of the toxic links. They all from sites that have been deindexed by google. But my question is a about the suspicious links. What should my criteria be for removing them? Am I better off removing them all and leaving my site with only 24 healthy links or should I personally comb through them and remove only the worst of the worst so that I leave my site with a few more links? I'd really like to get the site ready to resubmit to google as soon as I can. Thoughts? yyCOf.png
Link Building | | CobraJones950 -
How can I verify who links to me?
I need to verify all the inbound links I have coming in to my site. I've tried using OSE but have been told it does not scrape many smaller sites so cannot be sure of it's accuracy (especially since when I ran it, it returned a small % of the link i know are out there). Is there a way to do this in Analytics? Or another way? Thanks
Link Building | | NiallTom0 -
How many links per week is too fast in link building?
For a new website/blog how many links per week looks suspicious or hurt the rankings?
Link Building | | aaran1 -
Can you require link attribution under the creative commons license?
If we decide to put a variety of our images under a creative commons license, can we require that individuals who choose to utilize these images link back to us?
Link Building | | nicole.healthline1 -
Can indirect linking be valuable?
I have a client who is using a SEO company (Hubshout, delete name if necessary) to boost traffic to their website. They are doing this by publishing articles and submitting them to article directories, then they use their own sites/blogs (which are valueless, PR and MozRank of zero) to point to these articles and they say that this helps boost there rankings. How? They are not linking to the clients websites, creating artificial links from their own websites to article directories instead of the clients website. Are they trying to boost the value of the article or trying to boost their own websites? How does this help out the client? It is similar to three way linking but is not.
Link Building | | Michael_Rock0